Blog Post #9: Final Reflection

After completing ES2007S, I firmly believe that effective communication skills is essential in maintaining strong ties with family and friends; and good working relationships with people at work/school.

Through this course, I have gained an in-depth knowledge on effective communication skills. Initially, I considered myself to be a relatively effective communicator, who pays attention to people's emotions and feelings. However, this course has made me realised that this is a one-sided opinion on my part. This is because I have learnt that effective communication is a "two-way" process between two parties, just like it takes two hands to clap.

The course has taught me to be more aware of my non-verbal cues and how to be an "active listener". I think the latter is what I lack in at the beginning of the course. Subsequently, I took a conscious effort in putting the skill of "active listening" to better use in my group project, during the interview and group meetings.

Overall, I have gained numerous hard and soft skills from this course. The hard skills that I have learnt include apply 7Cs in my writings, writing impressive resumes and application letters, writing a persuasive formal proposal and making a lasting impression during an oral presentation. As for the soft skills that I have learnt, other than learning to be an active listener, I have also learnt the proper ways and channels of communication and putting them to good use during project discussions and when gathering data for my group’s proposal.

In a nutshell, I would like to thank Brad for facilitating our learning process during this semester, my team mates Rebecca and Napalie for giving me such a wonderful experience working with them; and classmates (including my blog groupmates, peer teaching groupmate and blogging buddy) for making our class so lively and interactive .

Blog Post #8: Reflection on Oral Presentation

1. Preparation

During the preparation of my slides, I organized them in order to provide a smooth flow of the story in my presentation. I tried to rehearse my speech several times to ensure that I can speak smoothly. During the preparation, my team members and I stayed till late night to ensure that we had several rehearsals. Furthermore, we also met an hour before the presentation to rehearse for the last time. I felt that having the sufficient number of rehearsals is important to put us into a comfortable level of confidence in telling our story. Furthermore, we invited some friends to be our audience during the presentation and they gave us useful feedback to improve our presentation.

One problem that I believe we faced in our preparation was time management. We used most of our time to improve our slides on the spot instead of amending them before we met. Thus, we had to spend more time than we expected to complete our rehearsals. I also realized that it is important to have ample rest before the presentation as we tend to make a lot of mistakes when we were tired during our presentation.

Another problem which continues to haunt me is the use of bullet points. It seems that the habit of using bullet points is too difficult to be replaced by other style of presentation. Thus I tried to use slide ware to reduce the number of points presented all at once on the same slide.

Behind a successful presentation are tons of practices and rehearsals. Having ample practices allowed us to prepare ourselves well to face our audience with confident. And because the words we wanted to say were deeply drilled into us, our presentation can flow well and the points we wanted to emphasize were clear.

2. Delivery

As my team members and I have allocated significant amount of time in our rehearsal, we were able to improve our speech during these rehearsals. We hope to engage our audiences by having some of our classmates to disguise as student representatives. This allowed us to pose questions to some of our classmates which would be interactive and might help to gain attention from the rest of our audiences.

One problem in my delivery lies in my tendency to drag my sentences. I tend to illustrate a simple point with a long statement. Therefore, it is important that I have sufficient practice to keep my sentences clear and concise.

From the presentation, I felt that it is important not to have my notes or scripts with me because I felt that I would rely on them even more. Instead, the slides became important visual aids which also act as cues for me to evaluate the points reflected on the slides.

3. Use of slide-ware or other audiovisuals.

Most of my slides contain slide-wares but not audiovisual aids. Due to the limited amount of time I had to prepare my slides, I focus on the use of slide-ware to emphasize my points. I also used some interesting picture to gain audience’s attention and interest. From what Brad had taught us about using picture, I try to use some pictures as background when the picture do not have significant illustrative points while other pictures that stands out will increase the impact of the points which I want to emphasize.

Blog Post #7: Effective Communication?

I find this interesting picture while I was working on my oral presentation.

Hope you have a moment of fun. :P

Blog Post #6: Reflecting on the Research Project Experience

1. Being a team player:

The amount of workload that my team members and I are having now can be overwhelming especially when we are currently in the last year of our undergraduate studies. Hence, this project demands us to be able to coordinate our work as a team to meet deadlines and project requirements.

As my team members and I are from a different major but same year of studies, we share almost similar timetables and this makes it easier for us to arrange a common time that is convenient for us to meet and discuss about the project.

However, we still have to manage our hefty workload consisting of various school assignments and tests on top of our individual personal commitments (both in and out of school). I felt that my team members and I did an excellent job on that, because we learnt how to prioritize our activities and make sacrifices when necessary to cater to the needs of our project.

Overall, I have learnt that being a team player is about learning to accommodate to each other's working styles. At the same time, to understand and encourage anyone in the team who is overwhelm by the hefty workload at hand.

2. Doing research:
What I learnt in class is highly effective when comes to research such as conducting verbal interview with our respondents. Before the interview, our group would come together to discuss the answers we hoped to find out from that particular interviewee and we would complied them into a list of questions.

During the interview, I applied some of the 7Cs to speak clearly, correctly and courteously. I also learnt to practice active listening, so that I could give relevant response to what our interviewees brought up immediately, instead of relying on pre-planned questions that were drafted prior to the interview. I felt that this is extremely important to keep the interview process coherent and more natural.

3. Writing proposal:

As this is the first time we were writing proposal, we gained a lot of insight in writing professional proposal from advises given by Brad.

Despite we were struggling with the problem and purpose statement initially, we were able to manage through the project with everyone’s coordinated effort and constant supervision from Brad.

I felt that the use of wiki is highly effective for my team members and I to coordinate our effort. In addition, I was able to look at what other groups have done and to examine the pace of our work whether is it going in appropriate speed. Despite the technical glitches which wiki is facing now, I had an overall enjoyable experience to work with this interface.

Overall, I had a positive learning experience during the project experience.