Final Reflection on Learning

It has been 4 months since we started our journey on becoming great professional communicators. And here we are at the end of the semester writing our last blog posts. It feels like it was only last week we were in our first class in a seminar room at the Faculty of Science. Time does fly quickly.

In this post I will do a reflection on the skills I have picked up during the course of this module.

The most important aspect for me will definitely be my enhanced public speaking skills. The oral presentation, peer teaching and even the class discussions all focused on improving our presentation skills. And I think it is safe to say that each one of us did really improve ourselves over the time of this course. I am now more comfortable presenting in front of a crowd. I still have room for a lot of improvement but I guess this module helped me to take the first step towards becoming a better speaker.

Blogging helped me improve my writing skills while reading others' posts were another great way to get new perspectives on the same subjects. Everyone knows you will not be a better writer if you do not read. It was interesting to see how each one of us could write a completely different post about the same topic.

The feedback from Madam Fazilah and my peers also helped me immensely to improve my cover letter. I have to admit that I had some glaring errors in my cover letter which would have been definitely off-putting to the prospective hiring mangers.

Throughout this module one thing which was prevalent is peer review. Each and every class we reviewed each other, from our presentations to proposals. I liked how we always got a chance to improve our material after we receive feedback from others.

A major takeaway from ES2007S was the interaction we did beyond our regular class schedule. I developed good bonding even beyond my group partners. Consider this- I have never met Anthony and Jo, despite the three of us coming from the same major but during this course, we definitely developed a good sense of camaraderie. I would definitely make a suggestion to my department to take a leaf of the ES2007S course because I feel that there is a room for improvement in our engineering courses as far as student interaction is concerned.

Finally, I would like to wish you all a very happy vacation. To the graduates- congratulations on moving on to the real world of pay checks and bonuses. To the continuing students- all the very best for the upcoming semesters. To Madam Fazilah- thank you for making this module one of the best ones in my eight semesters of NUS. 

Reflection on Oral Presentation

Since we were the last group to present, the pressure was on us to deliver and live up to the high standards the other groups set for us. We met numerous times this week to prepare the slides and hone our presentation.

I was personally inspired seeing this great TED video by Simon Sinek on how great leaders inspire us- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI0cJdOzUcQ. He has repeatedly mentioned something which caught my attention- People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. This was applicable for our presentation topic on Foreign Workers because I felt that we would be grabbing the audience attention more if we could make them realize why we are doing it. We tried to highlight the purpose of our proposal- the betterment of the image of Singapore as a safe workplace with world-class labour force and being compassionate to the foreign workers. To my delight, I found Joel, Xudong, Haoxuan and Evelyn sharing similar points of view.

I feel that one major advantage we had compared to the other teams was the fact that our report was ready before our presentation. Thus we could pattern our presentation using contents from the report. While preparing the presentation, our primary focus was to minimize the use of texts in every slide so that the attention stays on the speaker rather than on the slides.

Our videos were chosen to generate pathos from the audience since we believed that empathy building for the foreign workers should be the crux of our presentation. Not be left out on logos and ethos, we carried out surveys to come up with numbers for the workers’ salaries and their living conditions and took interviews of construction workers to gain knowledge on their plight. I particularly enjoyed working on the introduction and the conclusion of the presentation because these gave me an opportunity to talk freely without the bounds of following any particular slide.

We hoped that we would be able to ascertain a quantitative value for cost of plan rather than only outlining the stakeholders and their responsibilities. I believe that this was a weakness in our presentation since providing the stakeholders with a quantitative value would have made them visualize how the benefits would surely outweigh the costs involved. We hope that some other group with higher manpower could work on the quantitative cost of plan of the proposal.

At last I would like to add the fact that this oral presentation helped me to learn how to speak passionately in front of an audience. I was the one beginning the presentation, all the more reason for me to be nervous. Practicing really helped me in being a little less nervous because I knew what I was going to talk about. As Amy Cuddy said, “Fake it till you become it”. Here’s hoping nobody noticed my nervousness!