Reflection on Oral Presentation (Post #5)

Finally, the oral presentation is over! This was a long week…

As our group was the last one to present, the pressure was on us to deliver. The first two teams, Liberty and Solution Diggers, were very, very impressive. Everyone was so professional and so well prepared that we had to work hard to match their level of performance. We met numerous times within this week to prepare the slides and also to practice.We changed our presentation according to the feedback received from our peer review team and Brad. We also reviewed each other within our team to make the presentation and delivery better.

I have to say, I have never prepared so much for a presentation in my life! And I believe it paid off to some extent, for me personally, as I am not a natural public speaker. Despite of that, I guess I did an OK job. I was glad that I didn’t have to look at the slides and didn’t stammer during the presentation. However, my biggest blunder was to insist on using the keyboard for controlling the slides. As many of my peers have pointed out, standing behind the computer was a mistake as it prevents the audience from seeing the presenter. I should have placed myself where the rest of my team mates stood for presenting their parts.

Now, I have to thank my teammates for doing such a wonderful job. I knew what Gwen was going to talk about, still I found myself listening intently what she was saying because she was just so enthusiastic and fluent in her delivery. Johanna differentiated our presentation from the rest and made it a whole lot more interactive by using the whiteboard. Last but not the least, Jae was naturally so charismatic and energetic that she managed to engage the audience and end the presentation with an impact.

I think our slides were also one of our positive aspects. We were inspired by the slides we see at all the TED talk presentations. We wanted to focus on one thing at a time on each slide. However, after seeing the first two teams’ slides, we wondered if our slides were a bit too minimal because both the Solution Diggers and Liberty’s slides had a professional template and followed a conventional style. In contrast ours looked very basic. In the end though, we decided that we liked the minimalistic look more and chose to go with it. Looking back, it seems we made the right call because it seems our peers liked our presentation slides after all.

At last I would like to add the fact that this oral presentation helped me to learn how to speak in front of an audience. I was the one beginning the presentation, all the more reason for me to be nervous. Practicing really helped me in being a little less nervous because I knew what I was going to talk about. As Amy Cuddy said, “Fake it till you become it” right? Here’s hoping nobody noticed my nervousness, ha ha!