Critical Reflection

Presentation showcase:

I was part of the showcase committee and was also one of the groups that presented during the showcase. It was a valuable experience for me as it was the first time I have ever presented to such a big crowd. I would describe myself as quite a bashful person and I would get butterflies in my stomach whenever I have to present to a big crowd. However, this showcase made me stepped out of my comfort zone to challenge myself. Some points that I felt I could do better was that my body language and tone of voice was not impactful enough to make a pitch to sell my team’s idea. However, at the same time, I perceive that it would be interesting for each presenter to have a different style of portraying their content rather than having each individual come out strongly. 

I also took the feedback received from the peer evaluation and made some improvements. I slowed down my pace of speech to present my ideas consistently and coherently and I tried to fluctuate the tone and volume of voice where it becomes stronger and louder whenever I wanted to emphasize certain points. When the showcase ended, I gathered feedback from my peers and all of them mentioned that they actually understood what our idea was and I was relieved as most of them commented that our presentation was confusing previously. I was so glad that I did not miss this opportunity to learn from this experience.

Module learning:

Before the start of this module, my perception of this module was similar to what I have learned previously in Temasek Polytechnic where I was taught how to write letters and emails. To my surprise, as weeks goes by, the knowledge I have gained from this module was immense. My goal was to improve my language writing skills as I feel that it is an essential and versatile skillset needed when I head out to the workforce in the future. As I pen down my thoughts through this reflection, I feel that my language skills have improved in terms of clarity and sentence structure. 

I really enjoy this module as it creates the opportunity for us to mingle around with our classmates for different assignments which will, in turn, help us to develop our communication skills. As I work together with different types of people, I learn to adapt and change accordingly to communicate easily and work well with them. Additionally, I can brush up my communication skills by being more firm whenever I needed to get important points or messages across as I feel that misunderstandings would happen easily if there is no communication involved.

Project learning:

One of the key aspects that I took away from this project was presentation skills. No matter how much importance the report holds, I believe that the presentation plays a crucial role in how we portray ourselves and the way we pitch our ideas to our stakeholders. When I held presentations in my polytechnic previously, the lecturers put into account a minimal percentage on presentation skills and were more focused on the content instead. On the contrary, this project’s presentation is different in a way as it involves having the ability to be able to sell and convince our stakeholders that what we are proposing is feasible and why they should adopt our suggestion. 

While I look at how my classmates presented their ideas, I was able to list the positive and negative aspects of their speech while I was completing their peer evaluation form. This way, I was also able to reflect on myself and find out what I needed to improve on. The peer evaluation provided us with a different dimension in terms of getting feedback as we were able to get opinions from various perspectives which gave us more intakes to what we could refine on. From this project experience, I will go one step further to work on my presentation skills by eliminating my bad habits in preparation for my IWSP presentation.