Oral Presentation Reflection

Firstly, I want to thank my group members: Nan, Hau and Edmund for their contribution to this project. They really helped me a lot and I also have learnt a lot from them. In fact, I used to work on the slides a lot. I often try to put a lot of information on the slides and I haven’t realized that the presentation is about the presenters until I take this course. Also, for the same slide, different ways of delivering can cause different impact. For example, I talked about one slide about the estimated cost of the second solution. In my preparation, I just said that “the cost is… and we only need to recruit 5 more students per year…”. However, Edmund told me it would be better if we say “the cost is… ” and then ask the audience “is it a large sum of money? Nope, actually we can make up from…” I was very impressed by that point.

Anyway, I have to talk about my oral presentation today. In our discussion, we agree to make our slides as few as possible and use more pictures to emphasize our points. So I use many pictures without many words, like the old schedule, the changed schedule and busy YIH canteen. However, I feel that the transition of my slides is not well done. I also think the link between my slides and my speech is not highly connected. (Maybe it is because of my mistake during the presentation).

For the delivery part, I think the mistake during my presentation really affected me a lot. I was supposed to answer Hau’s question and walked to the stage slowly and confidently. However, it turned out to be that I walked to the stage frightenedly. I prepared a lot but it still happened, out of my expectation of course. In fact, I didn’t know what my gestures were because I was very nervous. However, I tried to keep eye contact with the audience after I remembered everything. I didn’t know whether it was effective or not because maybe I looked really stressed and my eye contact were no longer there.

I hope my mistake didn’t affect my group’s presentation too much. I wanted to say that I should have remembered the main points instead of the script and I will try my best to do it next time.