brief Summary for Es2007

Oral presentation:
eye contact
familiar with content(notes and memorising)
hand gesture
objective
confidence
tailoring speech
visual aid(should not replace the speech, just helps to visualise)

interpersonal/intercultural skill
sympathy
understand others
love them
active listening
nonverbal cues
control anger. do not take blame personally.be objective and open to suggestion
the leader is the best communicator
To interact with other team members:
to show that you are one of them
do not judge personally, be objective(eg."this are the things you may adopted...etc". instead of "you are stupid...etc")
common goal

applying jobs
In the employee's shoes
application letter:
format
short but precise. only a introduction
do not repeat resume
make it attractive
resume:
only contain relevent infomation
precise but impactful
inteview:
preparation
mock interview questions
practice

Final reflection on learning

I have learnt many important things from this course. It is so difficult to pick just one to comment on as required by blogging directory. I appreciate every talk, slides, video, and presentation. My friend Dinesh said that he is thankful that es2007 is a core module for engineering student, I cannot agree more. Unlike other modules, I believe everything (literally) I have learnt in this module will benefit me even after graduation. That is why I will write a summary after this post, so that I can come back for revision in the future.

The focus of my development through the course I choose is definitely interpersonal skill. 

Apart from the knowledge, this course also provided great opportunities to interact with different people. This class is formed by different kind of people and each of them is unique. I really appreciate talking to any of my classmates. In this course, we are forced to form teams with different classmates. But the result was unexpected awesome. We practically practiced what we have learnt from the course about interpersonal/intercultural communication.

The group proposal gave us experience working as a team. We have learnt to interact with other team members whom might be from a totally different culture. We had small disagreements often, but because we had the common goal and we tried our best to communicate, everything turned out to be great.

There is this small point Madam Radhika mentioned during class which changed my life. She taught me that the key of interpersonal interaction is to love the person you are talking to. I was so surprise when I heard that.

At the beginning of this course, Madam Radhika asked us what the most important thing in interpersonal communication is. Some people said trust, some people said sympathy, Redonia said humor. My answer to that question is (in business world) both of the parties should have expectation on each other. I believed every conversation should have a purpose (except talking with friends, in which case conversation contains tons of rubbish and usually served no purpose at all).

Actually before this course, I have already realized that there is something wrong with myself. I was the worst ice breaker in the world. I am handicap of starting topics for conversation. I have tried really hard to figure out the reason until I attended that lesson in which I learnt the key of interpersonal communication is to like whom you are talking to. It really changed my world. Uncountable scenes of conversation flashed through my mind and then I realized each time I met someone, I respect them as individual, and that was all. I did not like them (nor hate them, just neutral), therefore I did not try to know them. I did not even try to be friend with them.

I truly believe it is the most important thing that I have learnt from this course. I would like to share it with anyone who is reading this post and hope it will inspire anyone who has similar experience.

I enjoyed every moment with my classmates and Madam Radhika. Thank you.

Reflection on oral presentation

I did my first oral presentation in week 3 for peer teaching. Ever since that, we have learned a lot of oral presentation skills in this course. My teammates and I spent considerable effort preparing and delivering this presentation. I felt proud of us.

Before the actual presentation, we met up to have a dry run. Apart from practicing, we gave suggestions to each other as well. I appreciate their suggestions very much. I would have done badly without their help.

Similar to peer-teaching section, I used to have many animal pictures in my presentation. They pointed out that it is inappropriate because instead of classmates for peer-teaching, the target audience of our proposal is the ODE department. KokWei Arvind and Eyo provided many suggestions to help me modifying the slides to suit our proposal better. I believe the carefully tailored script and slides is one strength of my presentation.

During the speech, I used a personal story to illustrate our group’s concern on transport inefficiency. I think it is another strength of my presentation. Based on what we have learnt from peer teaching, storytelling is appropriate for this situation.

Unlike many of my classmates, I was not able to construct a good speech on the spot without preparation because my logic flow is not in English. During our rehearsal, my teammates suggested that I should write down a script to reduce grammar mistakes. By memorizing the script, I would pay more attention on articulation, hand gestures and eye contact during the presentation. This is another important thing I have learnt and apply.

Although I felt proud of our presentation, there are still many improvements can be done to make my oral presentation more robust.

One of the weaknesses is that, during the presentation, I looked at the notes too frequently. It was the first time I used notes in speech. I made one note for each slides, so during presentation I had more than 20 pieces of them in my hand. Ironically, I had to look at them often to check whether I was on the correct page even if I knew the content. For future presentations, I will only write down necessary information on notes. Instead of the whole script- like it is a math cheat sheet. I will keep it organized, brief and more readable.

Another weakness is that I was nervous, even though my audiences are just my friends. This made me realize that although compared with the first presentation I delivered at the beginning of this course, I am getting much more comfortable and confidence for presentation; I am still very far from a qualified speaker. Es2007 is just a start; I will keep practicing and learning without my friends and Dr Radhika’s help in the future.

Thank you.