Final Reflection: The journey from "taciturn listeners" to "voluble speakers"

The sands of time sure trickle fast. It feels like only yesterday that I entered into the ES2007S class. Now its past thirteen weeks. 


Truly the journey of this module has been memorable and insightful. Ranging from brainstorming over problem solving, presenting and defending our ideas to reflecting over the hiccups of the past, we students have evolved from “taciturn listeners” to confident “voluble speakers” dying to speak out and voice our opinion.


Let me summarize what we’ve learnt over these few months with the 7Cs of effective communication and teamwork.

COURTESY – Throughout this module we were made to interact with each other, collaborate and cooperate while working in teams and thus enhance our listening and inter-personal skills. We learnt to respect each other’s opinion, faced and dealt with conflicting ideas and in the process, also learnt about different cultures and thought processes.

CORRECTNESS – We worked together to solve prominent problems in Singapore, put forward our ideas in the form of the project proposal, which was questioned and tested for its validity and practicality. Working in teams helped analyse all aspects of the problem and thus prejudices, limited knowledge and other weaknesses could be avoided.

CONCISENESS – Whether it was during the peer teaching or the written project proposal and oral interaction, we learnt to be brief and yet precise, based either on time or on the amount of content.

CLARITY- Belonging to a group with members of different cultural backgrounds, it was essential for us to be clear while expressing our point of view. We learnt to overcome any language barrier and work together to complete the task at hand. Watching our oral presentation videos, we realised how important a role clarity plays, for the idea proposed to be properly understood.

COHERENCE – While preparing for the oral presentation or the project report itself, we discussed the subject thoroughly and ensured a healthy exchange and intermixing of ideas and a good level of understanding between each member of the team so that our individual parts would be coherent and inter-related.


CONCRETENESS – It is not only important to express yourself cogently, but also to defend your proposal/solution with valid arguments and polite rebuttal if its questionability is challenged, which we learnt through our oral presentation session.

COMPLETENESS – As they say ‘Practice makes a man perfect’ and indeed we have managed to greatly improve our oral, critical and interpersonal skills through the various presentations, interviews and group discussions that we have had in this module. From nervous wrecks, we have emerged confident and poised, ready to face the world and its people.


Though we spent a huge portion of this semester managing the heavy work load of this module, I feel the skills that this module imparted to me, I will treasure for life. Effective communication and team work skills are really important to succeed in this globalized world. Surely engineers do not just sit behind the chair and work!


A generous and heart-felt thanks to Ms. Lim for bearing with us. If it were not for her keen eye for identifying our strengths and her positive comments, all this would not have been possible.


Regards,
Akash

Reflection on Oral Presentation

Ensuring sustainable growth of Singapore: When we were choosing the topic for our project, this topic clearly stood out to us from the rest, and hence we chose it. However, when we started with writing the project proposal, we realized how broad this topic was, and had a bit of difficulty narrowing down our topic. Frankly speaking, I could not really identify many things to improve in Singapore, considering the quality of life and growth everyone has here. What we realized was that behind this glorious life at Singapore, there is the workforce which is making it happen. After a bit of research, we found that there is indeed something to improve on in Singapore, to ensure the sustainability of Singapore's development, the life of these migrant workers.


One interview session with a migrant worker, several personal surveys, group discussions and a million articles later, we realised that the situation of these migrant workers was MUCH more complex than what we had imagined it to be. Our group started with the project proposal just as a part of our module requirement. However, over the time it turned into something which we actually felt for, and wished to bring about a change in.


I believe that this passion is the reason why our presentation went pretty well in my opinion. Until one member of the audience commented, I did not realize that our presentation and proposal seemed a bit ambitious. After the presentation, I lend it some thought, and was convinced that we can actually bring about the change we have suggested in our proposal.


On reviewing the overall presentation of the group, I’d say all in all we managed to do a good job. We made use of creative slides with effective visual aids, relevant content explaining our observations and conclusions and supported our proposal with practical examples such as the migrant workers' dorm on Bukit Batok Expressway, so that the panel could relate to it in Singapore. But what we probably lacked, was effective time management. Our topic was very vast, one that would need a whole lot of explanation to the idea behind our solution, but alas time chose to give up on us.


Personally even though I’d say I have improved since the last presentation, I still have more room for improvement. I had prepared what I would say for each slide, and was clear that my objective was to vividly display the current problems and induce positive emotions in the audience for these workers. To do so, I believed that the video I had come across was absolutely necessary. However, this increased the pressure on me, especially since we were being timed, and I had to make sure I don't eat into my group mates' time. This set in a little nervousness in me, but I tried my best to cover it up.


Apart from the time constraint, one more thing I was confused about was my facial expressions. In presentations, generally we are expected to smile and appear friendly to the audience. However, the intensity of the problem we were dealing with made it feel highly inappropriate to smile. I decided to go with the flow of my emotions during the presentation, and could not help not smiling.


The Q&A session was pretty interesting as well. Lots of questions from the audience, some regarding the authenticity of our strong statements and some doubting the practicality of our suggestions. However, I believe our group did a great job handling each question smartly and truly. I hope we were able to convince the audience.


During the entire time, I tried to be clear and concise while speaking since I tend to get a little fast at times, and emphasized on those points that I found relevant, using effective voice modulation. I also managed to maintain a good eye contact with the audience and used appropriate hand gestures to support my explanations. However, these could still be worked on and improved.