A Reflection on The Course

The semesters in NUS are extremely short. After thirteen weeks, we are now in the end of the semester, leaving only the final exams awaiting us.

This blog post will signify the end of the professional communication course I took this semester. However, there is still a long way for me to learn and improve on my communication skills.

At first, I did not expect the course to be in a general perspective, I was expecting more of a detailed and specific course, similar to ES2002 Business Communication. However, by starting from a broad and general view of different communication skills gives me a different perspective and insight into what I originally know about communication skills, allowing me to work on certain fields I can improve on in a more organized and systematic approach.

One of the most important lesson I learnt in this course is to know myself better from the eyes of others. One can only know a limited amount about thyself, but with the feedback of others, one can easily identify problems which he/she never noticed and improve on an accelerated rate. This course has given me the opportunity of working and interacting with different people, and also their feedback on my performances. The most insightful part of the course is when I was going through each of my classmates comments and feedbacks, with every comment shedding new light into my thoughts. However, this opportunity is not easily available everywhere, especially when one goes into the working place. It will be a challenge to make use each of this opportunity in the future and build up on it.

Besides that, the resume and application letter writing as well as the interview are also considered one of the best lesson learnt from this course. I would still be clueless if I had not participate and tried them. And this is certainly an area where I could and must improve on. The presentation section provides an extremely good platform for me to improve on my presentation skills, and to grasp the key technique in switching presentation styles in different situation. And most importantly, we get to share our different views on certain issues or stuff, and to think how others think. And of course, all of this could not have been possible without the professional guidance of our tutor, Ms. Lim.

Until now, I still find myself having a hard time trying to communicate via online platforms such as blogging. Trying to find the words and arrange them to express what is going in my head proves a challenge for me. Is there a more efficient way of improving on this besides more practises? Well, that is definitely one of the important things that I can work on for now.

A Thought After The Presentation

The presentation ended two days ago. Everything was smooth, however, I am quite disappointed with my own performance. But it made me think.

Yashfeer, Fang Yong and me are in the same group, presenting on "Improving The Industry Skills of Mechanical Engineering Undergraduates". We have been working for months on this proposal, and during the presentation, I presented on "Ways to Improve The Industry Skills of Mechanical Engineering Undergraduates From The Internship Aspect".

Just a brief recall when I was presenting:

Yashfeer started the presentation first, he did an excellent job. During that time, I was stressing myself to focus on my fluency and pronunciation (which I am pretty bad in), trying to recall every word in every situation, hoping that my performance will be as good or even better than the multiple rehearsals I had the night before. Then, it was my turn. When I started, it was ok, or in other words, according to plan. But as soon as I move on to some of the slides, I suddenly started to choke on some of the words, having these unnatural pauses. And this is the first time after a few years that this feeling fear sparkled in my eyes. I never felt this uneasy and unnatural when presenting before, and this sparkle of fear suddenly cascades into a series of mistakes. And I realized I focused on the wrong direction.

I put in a more than normal effort in preparing this presentation. I was hoping for a breakthrough. I wrote out every word for my speech, and rehearsed for hours until I can close my eyes and still go on presenting while coordinating my slides with my speech. I got to focused in getting every word right and make sure the flow and pace is right, that I missed one really important point that affect my performance significantly: Just being myself.

For all of my previous presentations, I kept on telling myself that to just be myself, present as how I would like to present, present on what I would like to present, simply just connect with the audience, following and leading their chain of thoughts, so that they would understand the main points of the presentation. And the biggest mistake I did for this presentation, is to solely focus on each and every word of the speech, and ignore the connection and interaction between the audience and me.

And for next time, I will be experimenting on myself on how I will balance both of aspects (fluency and connection), perhaps by skipping the script writing and jump into rehearsal instead, and see what can I achieve.