Final reflection

This evening's rain easily makes people emotional, just like the heavy rain of the day I graduated from high school. Coming the heavy rainy season, coming the time we begin to pray to Bell Curve God. Here comes the time to write the final reflection.

I remember Ronald wrote in a comment that I looked like a timid mouse in the peer teaching. Laura also mentioned that she noticed some people being shy in the first few classes. I believe I was one of those. I am usually shy and don't have much experience on presenting and formal writing. That's why I took this course, beside the reason that it was to map to one of my core modules. The mouse has only 2 more years to evolve.

It's my fortunate to take this course soon. The higher year I reach, the higher requirements I have to meet. Technical knowledge is crucially necessary but soft skill requirements is also an issue. This morning, my group in a programming module had to demo our software to the lecturer. Actually it was a demo session, which focused more on technical aspects, but the experience on doing presentation from this module did help me a lot.

I am glad to gain many useful experience from this module. I have learnt many things, both from the materials and from you, my awesome classmates. You always gave me sincere and constructive feedback. I have learnt to make good presentation, to write resume, cover letter and proposal, to conduct a survey, to deal with stress during a job interview and to form group bonding. I have even learnt from Han how to stress people (so guilty). Specially, thanks to Chandra, I learned how to revenge when someone bullies me, haha.

In the future, there would be no more people to give me such detailed and honest feedback as all of you. I feel that from now on, I have to fight alone to my own weaknesses. But I have been prepared fundamental weapons for the fighting. I will try my best to conquer them to reach my aims and fly far in life. Jiayou me and jiayou you too. We all have our targets and desires, and I believe all of us have the ability to reach them if we try our best.

It may be hard to meet you again after this class, especially Ding Ding, Laura, Sumea and my final-year friends Bernard, Ronald and uncle Eric. I treasure all the time we have been together. Thank you very much for all your advises. Hope you will get best achievements you wish.

p/s: after this course, if you see me make any language mistakes in Fb posts and comments, please feel free to correct me. I really appreciate it.

Reflection on Oral Presentation

We are reaching the end of the course. Before the oral presentation, I felt like I had a lot of things to do with this module but after the presentation, I suddenly realized that I had just a few things left. 2 more blog posts, about 6 comments, and 2 two-hour classes. The oral presentation seems to be the last important assignment of this course.

After the oral presentation, I suddenly realized that I had learnt much about presentation in this module, intentionally and unintentionally. For me, I am happy that my presentation skill has been improved. I feel the difference between me in the peer teaching and me in the oral presentation. 

To be honest, I spent more time preparing for the oral presentation than preparing for the peer teaching. For the peer teaching, I did not know what to begin with. I had never had a chance to practice presentation before. I tried to look at how Bernard and Minthu, my 2 teammates, prepared but I had no clue. Minthu explained kindly to me what I should do but I still could not imagine. I sensed the "failure" beforehand but did not know how to improve.

In the oral presentation, things got better to me. Since I got experience from the peer teaching and I had seen the other groups doing presentation, I got some general ideas of what would going on. Chandra, Eric and Huiyun were very nice teammates.They kindly corrected even small mistakes for me: my word choices, intonation, and gestures. Huiyun helped me with the slides. Her PowerPoint skill was awesome.

The experience from the peer teaching really helped. After reading Bernard's self reflection and seeing the other groups' performance, I had some ideas of how to prepare for a presentation. In the past, I just thought of the ideas in my mind, sometimes murmur them, but did not say them out loudly and did not have any run-throughs with my teammates. No wonder why during the presentations, I often forgot ideas, used wrong words, and made so many grammatical mistakes.

Having prepared well, my performance in the oral presentation was better than that in the peer teaching. When I was presenting, I sometimes caught the encouraging eye-contact of Bernard, Minthu, Ronald, and Laura. This gave me the confidence that I was in the right way. My part was survey analyzing. Actually I felt it easier than the part I presented in the mock presentation, methodology, as all the statistics were on the slides, what I had to do was to link them together and emphasize how they supported our proposal.

However, frankly speaking, my presentation had many crucial weaknesses. I lacked of eye-contact and was not so natural. I was so intensive sometimes. I was still afraid of standing in front of many people, so I was embarrassed. My speaking was not so fluent also. I often stumbled and often included "ah..ah.." when speaking. The parts of the 3 other teammates Eric, Chandra and Huiyun were more natural than mine. I should have practiced more.

As Han wrote in his blog post, we all have a long way to go to reach our own aims. In the future, I will have to do many more important presentations, the nearest one is the FYP presentation 2 years later. I hope from now to that point, I would do my best to improve my presentation skill. Hope I will perform better in the FYP presentation 2 years later and good luck to those who are having FYP presentation.