Reflections on Oral Presentation

The oral presentation for ES2007S was one of the few times in my NUS life in which I had to do a presentation. As compared to the peer teaching, this time was slightly different as it was more formal. From the peer teaching experience, Dr Radhika said that I knew my content well, distributed my eye contact evenly and projected my voice well. Hence, I continued to make sure that I maintained these qualities during the oral presentation as well.

On our way to the Oral Presentation. Go Go Green Garden Group!

Although my classmates remained the same from the peer teaching, the “audience” was different, and every presentation has to be catered specifically to the audience. If I had any “take homes”, it would be that I learnt how to be focused in my presentation. I learnt that every good presentation has to be able to sum up into a sentence. That kept our presentation on track. I also learnt that, if we wanted to deliver a strong and convincing presentation, we have to keep the ‘meat’ of our presentation compact. As such, certain details like case studies were left out and only important ideas remained our presentation. Quoting Garr Reynolds, an effective professional presenter, he said “Eat only until 80% full”. He meant that we should not bore our audience with details after details but give them enough to leave them thirsting for more.

Dr Radhika gave good and encouraging comments to our presentation, and it really boosted my self-confidence in public speaking, provided I was well-prepared. Her positive comments let me know that our preparation for the oral presentation itself did not go wrong. Actually, I thought that the comments given by Dr Radhika might be a little too generous. She could have been more critical of our presentation, as I thought that there were still areas that we could improve.

Working with my group mates was fun because both of them were always so cheerful. However, we might have been a little too tardy with work on the presentation, as slides were only readied less than 2 days before the presentation. However, I am sure each of us has put in huge amounts of thought and effort into creating an engaging and interesting presentation before sending to me for compilation. I, being a slight perfectionist myself, put myself in charge of the consistency of the slides, in terms of alignment and font colours. I was picky about the nitty-gritty details I found on the presentation of other groups and I realized my group would not be spared from the chopping board either. Other than that, I thought that the flow of the presentation was quite smooth. This was probably because that problem had already been overcome in our project proposal. All in all, I would say that our group efforts paid off.

Thank you Dr Radhika for teaching us and guiding us, and thank you Yijie and Seow Peng for bearing with my late work. Thank you to all my class mates for being such friendly and supportive people, always giving friendly and constructive comments. J