Final Reflection

In the blink of an eye, 13 weeks have passed and our ES2007s journey has come to an end. Honestly speaking, ES2007S is one of the modules that I have enjoyed the most in NUS thus far. This module focuses on fostering interaction and developing interpersonal skills between students. Most of the time, we have to either work in groups to come up with ideas and present them to the class and after that, all the groups will give feedback to each other. I am from the school of computing and faculty of engineering and this module very different from any of the modules offered by these 2 faculties. I am not saying that the modules offered by the SOC or FOE are bad, it is just the difference in the nature of the modules. Their module are more content heavy and they have a more specific teaching guideline whereas in ES2007, lesson plans seems more flexible and we just do not know what to expect for the each lesson. 

Next I must say that this module is very relevant to NUS students. Personally, I had come across some people that graduated from university without even know how to write a proper resume or cover letter. Therefore I think that the resume and cover letter part of the module is very helpful to the NUS students especially those who are applying for jobs or internship positions. Through this module, I also gained an insight on how the actual job interview is being carried out through the two mock job interview sessions conducted during the lesson. We role-played both the interviewer and interviewee to have a better understanding of what the interviewers are looking for and also get to practice answering interview questions. This had helped me to be able to better prepare for upcoming interviews in the near future.

Lastly, this module had given us ample chance to practice and improve on our presentation skills. First, there is the peer teaching where we are split into groups to come up with a short interactive lesson for the class. This not only helped us improve our presentation skills but also our interpersonal skills as we had to facilitate the class through the various interactive activities that we had planned. I felt that this peer teaching is a really good way to let the students practice interpersonal and presentation skills but the planning part is really time-consuming in my opinion. Next we had our final oral presentation where we need to present our ideas to the class and also at the same time, convince them to buy our ideas. This is not an easy task and I think every group really did a great job for their final presentation. 

And finally, I want to thank Brad for being such an excellent tutor and also everyone in the class for making this module so fun and enjoyable. It is a great pleasure to be able to work with all of you. All the best for the coming exams!

"Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again." – William Shakespeare

Reflecting on Oral Presentation

Firstly, I would like to congratulate everyone for doing a great job for the oral presentation. We have cleared the final hurdle for this course! I also want thank all my group mates for putting in so much effort for our proposal, speech and all the rehearsals for our presentation. It has been a wonderful experience working with all of you guys.

Our group's topic for the oral presentation is on evaluating the no-smoking policy in NUS. I think that this is a very challenging and controversial topic to present on. Our group had even thought of changing our topic during the earlier part of the course because we are afraid we are not able to convince the audience during our final presentation. In the end after the whole presentation, more than half the class supported our idea of having smoking area in NUS and this really made us feel a sense of accomplishment in what we have done. We were really happy and we felt that all of our hard work thus far is all worth it after all.  Looking back now, we had definitely made the right choice to stick to this topic.

For the presentation, I chose to adopte a new style of not using bullet points in my slides. We are also not supposed to refer to cue cards during our presentation and this is quite challenging for me as I am used to present using cue cards. Without the cue cards and the bullet points in the slides, I would have to be know my content really well as there is nothing for me to refer to if I forget a point and that was exactly what happened during the actual presentation. I stumbled a few times and I forgot to mention a few points which I am supposed to. This is partly my fault as I think I did not memorise my part well enough and I am still not used to having nothing to refer to. I also realise that I have many pauses in between my presentation and I did not have enough interaction with the audience throughout my presentation. These are mainly the few areas that I can improve on.

Through this oral presentation, I have learned new presentation skills as well as knowing more about my strengths and weakness in presenting. There is definitely still a lot of areas which I can improve on. In my future presentation, I think I will still choose to do away with my cue cards as that would force me to know my content well instead of just referring to cue cards. It has been a good experience taking this communication class and having a chance to improve on my presentation skills.