Reflection: Oral Presentation

Just a few days ago, our group presented our proposal to rest of the class of ES2007s. Looking back, my group mates and I have really dedicated a great deal of time and effort into refining the proposal to the best of our abilities, and the same goes for the oral presentation!

Week 11 was a week when all four of us were swamped with endless term papers due,other tests and presentations for other modules, but our wanted very much to do justice to our proposal through our presentation, and we made time for it nonetheless and started preparing for it as early as possible. As we did not have time for much face-to-face meeting to prepare the slides together, we divided the workload according to the parts which we would be presenting. The good thing was we saved time (we got a lot of things covered in the shortest amount of time possible) but then we might have compromised on making our personal styles of presentation fit more snugly together as a group. Upon hindsight, I thought we could really improve on that, if we took more effort to take the time out to comment on one another’s mistakes and flaws during our practice sessions. Although I believed that our slides sufficiently aided us in bringing our ideas across, it could have been better if it had a more professional finish and if our styles of presentation blended in more seamlessly, as this was, ultimately, a group effort.

On a positive note, preparation was done more thoroughly for the implementation of the content itself, bringing across to the audience our cause for this proposal. Our proposed solutions for the NUS Internal Shuttle Buses(ISB) services, as well as at busstops will serve to benefit everyone of us in the class, in fact the whole student and staff population, if they are implemented. Thus, we aimed at making the audience internalize the real situation at hand, and pause to analyze if they, indeed feel the same way as we do. In my opinion, I feel that we have achieved that to a certain extent!

With regards to personal delivery during the presentation, I have to admit that I did feel the jitters right before it was my turn to present. It was most nerve wrecking few seconds -as I heard the last two sentences of the presenter before me float past my ears, and before I knew it, I was up. It was the 5 minutes which will make or break it. Despite knowing the proposal inside out, I was still not as fluent as I thought I would be. Sometimes I wonder if even with many more hours of practice, the same mistakes will corrected. I have come to reaslise that it is proabably better to prepare for the worst situations and keep calm at all times. It is our anxiety, which brings us down.

To end off looking on the brighter side, I believe that I was energetic and enthusiastic while presenting my part, because I believed very strongly in our proposal and was set to convince the rest of the class of the viability of our proposal as well! Also, keeping up the level of energy and audience interaction was important in keeping up with their short attention span. This 20%-worthy-5-minute-presentation has definitely taught me that I must first convince myself that I am prepared to persuade others of my ideas, before I set out to do so.