Blogpost 6: Reflection on Oral Presentation

"There was too much hand movements and gestures. You turn to the screen quite often. You tried to explain it too much." At least to the best of my memory, I recalled these were the comments given to me during the peer teaching session. From then on, I reminded myself the need to improve my self-awareness during presentations; I get too animated at times when I try to seek my audience's attention.

For this finale of ES2007S, I thought the oral presentation of TeamScientists was superb, relative to our previous performace during peer teaching. But on the individual level, I am not without flaws. I shall touch on three main components of the oral presentation: preparation, delivery and visual-aids.

First up, the preparation. Overall, I did not alloate sufficient time to rehearse the presentation. There was the problem of my poor time management, towards the end of this semester, which led to inadequate practice. I was aware of this, so my only attempt to resolve the issue was through running presentation scenarios in my head while I am on the train, bus and before I sleep. This method worked pretty well as a last resort.

In the inital phase of preparations, I attempted to construct my sentences and develop a flow at the moment of presenting. Apparently, it was terrible, and I am sure Emily and Joshua would agree with me. My ideas seemed as if they were rolling out of a BINGO machine. My flow...well, nothing flowed. So I took the advice of my teammates and prepared a script. At the next rehearsal, the script worked magic. By the final rehearsal, I had the points and flow embedded in my head. The take home message here: prepare a script to construct your flow.

For the preparation of slides, I personally gave it the least emphasis; I was adopting the school of thought that you are the best means to convey a message (reminded by Brad's mention of the absence of powerpoint and electronic visual aids in the past). However, what I thought was not conveyed clearly enough to my teammates; I was glad to have less reliance on powerpoint, but at the same time, I was worried that adopting such ideas could have undesirable repercussions. That brought about some delays in the preparatory work, since a fundamental methodology could not be established.

Secondly, the delivery. Before I present to the class, it was a nerve-wrecking wait. During the presentation, I was on "auto-pilot". After delivering my message, I felt relieved.

The delivery process was tough; I had to pay attention to three things while at it. These three things were minimizing gestures, reducing my tendency to turn to the screen and maintaining eye-contact. I felt a sense of achievement to have all these three things under conscious control, in addition to being fairly aware of what I was saying; I was almost on complete "auto-pilot" since I had to constantly pay attention to myself, without losing eye-contact with the audience and speaking the correct sentences.

My weakness in the delievery was most likely the lack of friendliness and enthusiasm. I realised smiling and showing excitement were effective ways to draw your audience's attention. I really have to improve on the 'smiling' part.

Lastly, the use of slidewares. Powerpoint is a useful tool, but sometimes it could easily tempt the user into over-reliance. I felt that for a first try in the minimalistic approach, I did quite well in focusing the attention of the audience on what I have to say. The only weakness I found in this approach was the lack of highly relevant pictures; it was difficult to obtain pictures that could speak for itslef, for instance, a picture on 'postcards from the lab' that could explain how the recommendation could be carry out.

Overall, I felt I did quite well for the oral presentation; I felt that I had improved a lot since peer teaching. However, there is still much to do in improving the effectiveness of my skills. Currently, my perception towards oral presentation has evolved; I now believe that oral presentation is a form of art; there is no need to conform to the norms. Essentially, oral presentations can be done in many ways with the key being creativity.