The Final Post: A Reflection on Professional Communication

    I took professional communication, ES2007S, to be able to match it with a similar course in McGill. I was expecting the lectures to be similar to normal classes: boring, long and demanding. But my expectations were wrong. Although this class was sometimes demanding, it was not boring nor long. Every lecture I have attended was a fun lecture where everybody interacts together to learn, to help, to teach and to socialize. 

    I quickly realized, in the beginning of this class, that public speaking is a skill I needed to practise. In addition, while writing the first blog post, I did not know about my writing capabilities. With time and practise, I feel that I improved in comparison with my capabilities in the beginning of this course. 

    In a nutshell, blog posts where fun and creative, peer teaching made me learn about inter-cultural communication, proposal was a great way to to build up team working skills and finally the presentations (Peer teaching and Proposal presentation) were a great platform to improve public speaking skills. 

    While I feel that I greatly improved many of the skills listed above, I still need to keep on practising for better results. An interesting comparison would be with a painting, it takes years to perfect it and you paint and you repaint over the imperfections of your painting. For example, the Mona Lisa painting was not finished in one session. It took Leonardo Da Vinci 16 years to perfect it and make it a piece of art. The same goes for communication skills, you learn the basics in class and you improve with practise, time and perseverance.

    I would like to thank Brad for a great course in which I learned a lot. and I would like to thank my team mates: Megha (proposal and peer teaching), Ramandeep (Proposal) and Tong (Peer Teaching). Finally, I would like to thank everybody else that is in this class for a great learning experience. And for those who will be staying in Singapore, I will repeat what I proposed in our last day of class "Let us have a reunion next year!!" 

Reflections On RMR Social Zone Presentation

        One of my biggest weaknesses is to perform a presentation in front of a crowd. I would stress out a lot during the presentation even if I was well prepared and knew my material perfectly. As a result, this caused me to forget some important details. To avoid such an event, a handy piece of paper with important facts of my presentation would be in my possession. 

        To control my stress, I would enter in a state of mind where I am seeing the presentation in front of me without losing touch of the fact that I am presenting in front of a crowd. This would remind me of each step I have to take for the presentation to make it as clear as possible and not forget any important detail. 

        But I have to be honest, that does not always work... I still forget some facts due to the stress, and the piece of paper in my hand would be a source of more stress than relief from it.

        What was special about this presentation is the fact that we had a cohesive group where members helped each other when needed. Moreover, while our main purpose was to achieve this proposal, this did not stop us from socializing and having fun (which is in line with our presentation ;) We want students at NUS to socialize and have fun while keeping up the hard work).

        What I learnt about this project is that nothing can be done without dedicated hard work. You should learn about the context of your proposal, the people you are proposing/presenting to, show that the advantages of your proposal, counter the disadvantages that might be encountered and prove the importance of your proposal by believing in it.