From a Communicator, to a Professional Communicator
Saturday, 10 November 2012
It is always the saddest moment to end a module in which you have learnt much from the course as well as fostered many friendships with the classmates. 

I started this semester choosing ES2007S as one of my modules because of the following reasons:

  1. ES2007S is different from my Statistics core modules which I thought I hope I can do better as compared to the difficult cores modules. 
  2. ES2007S will be teaching us the essential skills which would be important when we step out to the working world. 
  3. I do not want to graduate from university with only the textbook’s knowledge, but without any improvement in interpersonal skills.
At the start of the module, I constantly reminded myself to open up more and be more active in class discussion (I hope I did). Through various class discussions, it developed our critical thinking as well as to interact more with our classmates. From the blog posts, I have tried to refine my writings and hope that it will improve as the course progresses. Peer teaching and proposal writing have also given me several learning pointers such as the different ways of presenting and also to work well as a team to obtain the aim. Without the communication between the group mates, nothing is achievable. Finally, at the final oral presentation, my group chose took a risk by presenting without any visual aids and we make it appealing to the audiences. Through all these components of the course, as well as all the small activities, it all summed up and made me improve in terms of interpersonal communication as well as professional writing. The professional pointers will also be put to good use in the near future.

I am very thankful to Brad and my fellow classmates for all your advices and pointers throughout the course of this module. I hope I am no longer a socially “awkward turtle”, but now a professional communicator. (:
posted by yongsheng at 02:30 | Permalink | 16 comments
Reflection on Final Oral Presentation
The oral presentation is finally over! 

Giving presentation has always been my Achilles heel since junior college days as I am not born to be a good speaker. From peer teaching, the most insightful experience I had gained was the use of visual aids like PowerPoint slides which my team had prepared it so fantastically with mostly pictures and lesser of the words. However, when it comes to final oral presentation this time round, our group has wanted to do something different and we decided to discard all any visual aids. 

Our group managed to craft out the whole proposal with each of us having a deep understanding on almost all aspects of the topic we are handling. Therefore, we strongly believed that even without slides, we would be able to present to the various stakeholders our proposed solutions for we can be the presenters ourselves. We managed to fine tune our presentation and improve it to the best of our ability. Given the fact that it would be harder to get our ideas across to the stakeholders without the help of visual aids, the more we knew we need to present our proposed solutions such that it sounds extremely awesome and convincing for the stakeholders to buy our ideas. It was indeed the greatest challenge we had encountered so far. 

When my group mate was presenting, I was really nervous standing at the back and I can feel my hands trembling. I could even hear my heart pounding at a faster rate than the tickling of the clock. Personally, I do not think that I did well this time round. Although I knew all the stuff and I am fully aware of what I am presenting, the nervousness stepped in and caused me to stumble over words and also to speak at a faster pace than I planned to. On a brighter note, with the nodding of heads from the audiences such as Rohit, Bernard, Chadran and Shi Ying, and also the kind and heart-warming smile from Hui Yun, I managed to calm down with these acknowledgements. A big thank you to you all! J Overall, I am glad that my group’s presentation turned out fine and it did appeal to the audiences. 

Since the start of ES2007S, there are many different styles of presentations. To summarize, I believe that there shouldn’t be a fixed style of presenting. We should always tune and plan our presentation according to the agenda we have and also use the most suitable method to enable the audiences to capture the main ideas effectively. 

Click here for the video on our group's OP!
posted by yongsheng at 01:57 | Permalink | 12 comments