Reflection on Oral Presentation

Finally, the ES2007S proposal presentation is over!

PREPARATION

This presentation is one of the most time consuming project I had ever done. I spent the eve of presentation day touching up the slides to make sure the entire presentation transits smoothly. I finished doing up the slides at 3am and continued to rehearse for about 5 to 6 times before retiring to bed. Just before I fall into slumberland, I forced my brain to loop what I am going to present the next day and this continues until I totally lost consciousness.

In the morning of the presentation day, I woke up early and continued rehearsing for another 3 to 4 times. During the course of going through the presentation, I constantly put myself in the shoes of my audience to see if my arguments make sense. I recognized some of the points are not very strong and tried to either rephrase them or to replace them with other stronger evidences.

However, even after many rounds of editing, there are still some points which remained relatively fallible. I am at a dilemma because I can't remove them as they are vital transitional points to the subsequent key points.

For example, during the presentation, I showed a slide with the mean starting pay of graduates and I discussed the slide this way: "Our team has brainstormed several reasons for this disparity (in pay) and one possible reason would be the differences in curriculum." I went on to discuss the differences between the curriculum of the Business School and Faculty of Science.

If somebody had commented about the nature of the industry a graduate from Applied Science enters as a confounding factor besides curriculum, then, we would not be able to show explicitly that Professional Communication is largely responsible for the differences in pay.

I admit this is a big risk. However, given I had already memorized the sequence of my presentation and the lack of time (and I phrased my sentence in that manner), I went ahead with my prior presentation arrangement.

DELIVERY

I had previously wanted to include an array of delivery strategies such as engaging the audience by asking them a question: "Does anyone knows how many percentage of Science students said they are very confident of their communication skills." before showing them the shocking 4% result.

However, I later decided against it because it would be a rhetorical question since they would have already seen the presentation layout. Hence, I decided to stick to statistics to substantiate my claims.

I also considered what my audience wanted to hear and I figured they wanted to hear about the need for this additional module and the benefits they can get from implementing this module. Hence, I phrased my arguments in a persuasive manner to answer these questions.

PRESENTATION SLIDES

My presentation style previously is to put up all my points on the slides and then present by reading off from the slide. As a result, my slides are normally cluttered. (*If you remember my peer teaching slides*)

For this presentation, my team and I spent alot of effort designing our slides and this implies I can't throw all my points on the slides like before. I had to memorize all the information and this makes me feel very nervous as I had to take care of many things in my mind. These are the things going through my mind while I was presenting:

1. Think of what I am going to speak next

2. Be careful not to miss out on key transition words

3. Remember what animation follows the current one

4. Smile

5. Remain enthusiastic

6. Stop my hands from shivering

7. Smile

8. Eye contact
9. Smile

As a result, I ended up speaking a little too fast. I felt that given more practice, things would have improved drastically.

This presentation has been a different delivery experience for me and I hope it has been an enjoyable one for you too! Thank you for reading my entry and I'll be back with the final entry next week!