Reflections on Oral Presentation

Allow me to be honest, I may not be the best presenter ever but I have always loved presentations. (Am I weird?) I still get butterflies in my stomach when I have to stand in front of an audience and talk but I have always enjoyed the feeling after completing a presentation. So, yup, I was very very much looking forward to this final ES2007S presentation!

My team started working on our presentation a little later than the other teams and we were all feeling pretty stressed, especially when we saw that all the other 3 teams had notable progress with their slides and outlines on the wiki! But I'm glad my team-mates and I work pretty well under stress. We focused on how we can deliver an engaging presentation to the audience and decided to include a video which stars ourselves. (Kudos to Sheryl for editing the video!) We also decided to keep our slides minimalist, clean and distinctively black-and-white.

I was tasked to design the presentation slides and honestly, I enjoy doing so. However, we had a little problem because all three of us had our own presentation scripts, which may not flow well with the slides. Luckily, our team met up to iron out this little miscommunication and my teammates also sent me their final 'scripts' so that I could double-check and make changes. We did a 'time-check' and a mock presentation on Wednesday, two days before the presentation, to ensure that we do not over-shoot the time limit and that the presentation was coherent. The fact that the presentation was less than 48hours away finally sunk in and I was starting to feel jittery! I rehearsed my parts at home for the two nights, trying to remember as much as I could without looking at my cue cards and hoped for the best.

On the morning of our 'big day', we met up an hour earlier to have a final run-through of our presentation. That was also when I whipped out the tennis ball and explained my idea to Aldrich and Sheryl! We had zero rehearsals of the idea beforehand because we only decided to include it in at the very last minute. Before we knew it, it was time to go for class!

So, my laptop was slow but it worked fine. (Luckily!) Aldrich started on the introduction and gave an overview and went on to talk about some background information... it felt like he was talking too fast because IT WAS MY TURN, TOO SOON! I started off pretty confidently and made sure I had good posture and voice projection. (Did I, did I??) However, after the video and feeling embarrassed that I had my face all over the projector screen, I started to lose my focus and I found the need to peek at my cue cards. And I was definitely shocked when Aldrich threw the tennis ball back to me instead of Sheryl! After the presentation, I felt that I could have handled the situation much better. Instead of picking up the ball and instructing Aldrich to throw it to Sheryl, I should have just kept the ball and continued with the presentation and pretended like nothing went wrong! ): Be spontaneous be spontaneous!!

After the presentation, our team was prepared to be bombarded by questions during Q&A session but surprisingly, the floor was kind to us. We took turns to answer the questions (and completed each other's sentences, like twins!!) and were glad that it was over within the next few minutes!

I felt that our team did generally well for the presentation. We may not have been perfect and fantastic out there because we were nervous, but I felt that we managed to deliver our ideas across. On a personal level, I was also coping with the heartache of a breakup of a relationship of 2years plus and was a little disoriented throughout the week. Hence, I am grateful for team-mates like Aldrich and Sheryl, their presence definitely gave me a little confidence boost and the strength to stay strong!