A Course That is as Bright and Vibrant as a Sunflower Field

After endless days of composing and editing numerous drafts of job application letters and proposals, interviewing and surveying people and rehearsing for the presentations, our ES2007S Professional Communication course is finally over!

While I have learnt many communication skills over this semester, the most important one, in my opinion, is that I have learnt to listen to other people better. Working as a group for the peer-teaching and the proposal and oral presentation, I have realised that for us to be able to work cohesively together, I have to listen better to my group-mates and consider their ideas instead of dismissing their ideas and pushing mine on them. Talking to each other is essential in effective communication. But only when I listen to others then can our communication process be truly complete.

This module is definitely one which has provided me with the most opportunities to communicate with my course-mates and the lecturer. Being able to speak to my classmates and Brad in class was a refreshing, fun yet educating experience as compared to my other modules where we can go the entire semester without speaking to any other person in tutorials. As such, I looked forward to each ES2007S session.

While I can’t be definite that I would use all the skills that I have learnt after this course, I can promise that I would try my best. In the end, it would be the fundamental communication skills like self-management and active listening that I would remember for life.

To my dear classmates: Thanks for your support and contributions in class! Through our interactions and friendships, I have become a better person (and communicator). May our friendships last!

To Brad, our communications guru: Thanks so much for guiding us through an important aspect of our lives. You’re a great coach who can really engage us in class. Gan bei!

Reflecting on My OP Today

Finally, my oral presentation (OP) is over!


Although I had rehearsed my lines repeatedly, even with a group rehearsal yesterday, I think that I lacked confidence in my OP today. My mind went blank in some parts, causing me to stumble over some words and repeat others. Several times, I repeated the same ideas but with a rephrasing of the words. An example would be the idea about encouraging the use of ELearning platforms during the Benefits section.

Moreover, I feel that I did not have sufficient eye contact with the people in the room. I had been staring steadily forward at the back of the room instead of sweeping my gaze to each and everyone. Not only that, my hand gestures were minimal and were not helpful for the presentation. Furthermore, I closed the presentation quite abruptly after the conclusion. I had forgotten to thank the audience and tell them that “We hope that you would accept our proposal”. I feel that I also could have contributed more to the Q&A session as I noticed that Chee Siang tended to answer the bulk of the questions thrown to us.


On the other hand, I think that some positive points in my delivery would be that I was loud and had a pretty constant pace, although it increased and became slightly rushed towards the end of the OP. Additionally, I had made use of some quotes to emphasise my point that students having more convenience in charging their laptops is a very important benefit.

As mentioned by Xiang Min during the commenting session earlier, other than the slides, no other audio-visual media had been used in our OP. This was something that I had worried about initially during the preparation, especially as there had been a variety of videos used for the Peer-Teaching sessions. However, we were unable to find any relevant videos that could have been used. Besides, we felt that the PowerPoint slides would be sufficient.

Another reflection that I have is that I suppose that I could have made use of the remote to change slides instead of pressing the keyboard. Then I would have been able to stand out nearer the front of the room instead of staying behind the desk.

I think that the PowerPoint slides were a great job though, with elegant simplicity of the design, pictures to illustrate certain points and minimal wording. It was the combined accomplishment of my group and I thank you guys for your efforts. Mucho gracias!