A Final Reflection

ES2007S has been a very enriching experience for me. I took the module because I thought it sounded fun, there was stuff I wanted to learn from it, and best of all was non-examinable. But the last reason was the most misleading one, thinking it would be light easy certainly didn’t make it so haha.

But looking back now, it was truly quite a fun learning experience. The interactive classroom discussions were so lively and positive; I can’t remember ever taking a module that was anything like this before. Everyone chipped in to make classroom learning lots of fun and that really added value to the process. Our constant giving and receiving feedback was very useful as I thought that really helped me improve myself.

Doing the mock interviews was really cool, it totally blew my mind away with what sort of questions interviewers can actually ask haha. I shall certainly remember ‘demonstrate to me how you would teach the difference between mass and weight’ and ‘give me 10 ways you can use a pencil differently’.

Group project work was intense and at times I felt like I was never going to make it out alive with FYP, but my group mates were very supportive and kept on pushing us forward. In fact I felt humbled working with them, they never complained even with all their own work and FYPs and just kept going. It certainly helped me understand how important perseverance is at the end of the day.

Other useful skills I’ve improved over this semester would probably be learning how to write a proposal, conduct interviews, make good presentations and write an application letter and resume. These are certainly very useful skills to have in the future.

Best thing of all, I made friends in this module. I consider one of the most important reasons why we want to communicate well is so that we can make friends. Not just those in a close circle around us, but friends everywhere, from every background, culture and religion. It’s really saddening to read in the news of people fighting, mud-slinging and abusing each other. I believe communication should bring us closer to one another in respect, not turn each other away in anger or hatred. That’s certainly something I’m going to be using my improved skills for in the future.

Oral Presentation – A Reflection

My Oral Presentation

Preparation

Personally, what I really liked about my ES2007S oral presentation was the amount of behind the scenes preparation that actually went into it. It is much more that what I'm normally used to. Let's take the slide pasted above as an example. One simple title slide like this and I think I can give a five minute oral presentation just on how it came about. haha.

1. It wasn't easy finding suitable pictures for everything, even harder to find the right places to put them in. That nice picture on the slide with the circled word research was initially not going to be used anywhere, because the colours of the theme could not match it. Until we tweaked a few things and found the perfect place for it that is.

2. Choosing a theme for the presentation required discussion too. Should we have one? How about leaving it in white? What if its not professional enough? I'm quite sure at least some groups would have gone through the same tedious thought processes too. Fortunately, one of Aish's and Madhu's friends assured us. Hey simple = nice. White = simple. White = nice. Stick with it.

3. See that red/gray line at the bottom. Even that had thought put into it. It's supposed to be a timeline to let the audience know at which stage of the presentation we are at, something like the bars at the bottom of a survey.

Delivery

Hmm I would rate my delivery on Monday as average I guess. Didn't internalise my script as well as I would have liked so I ended up having to look at it fairly often. That broke up my train of thought and the speech a bit.

Judging from some of the facial expressions in the audience, I may not have been clear and convincing when selling the presentation.

A good point, maybe I'm speaking a bit louder now.

Slides and Audiovisual

Well this was probably the best part of the presentation. Thought the slides were nice! Mainly lots of fantastic work from Madhu and Aish. Cheers to you group mates :D