Reflection on Oral Presentation 2

We had our second oral presentation on 25th March, Thursday. It was about our research regarding the introduction of casinos in Singapore and the potential problems it may cause.

This was done with a different group from the first oral presentation. Although I believe I have improved, I still see many mistakes which I had made in the first presentation surface again for the second round.

The first half of my presentation was about primary research. When showcasing the survey results, I found it difficult to explain what the numbers meant. It was because I had not practiced since our presentation was postponed from Monday. I had forgotten some of my elaboration points and could not fill the gaps in my head, hence becoming very jittery and nervous. However, I was better prepared for the second part of the presentation which involved secondary research on why people gamble, as well as some statistics. These were interesting facts which I found easier to remember and thus I tried to make up for my previous slip up by adding more information during this section. As I became more confident, I relaxed and tried to share my knowledge in the most interesting way possible.

I had written notes for the presentation, but as I had to bend and tap the keyboard to move to the next slide, I felt it was too much of a hassle and so did not refer to them. This helped me give more eye contact to the audience and I could see I had connected with them and they were listening intently to what I had to say. It was very encouraging and so I could keep up my energy and enthusiastic when elaborating my points. This in turn, I hope, kept the audience awake which will then again induce me to keep being interesting. The cycle continues.

During the question and answer session, I was thinking of replies to the inquiries posed by my fellow classmates. However most of the questions were involving the solutions we had come up with for our problem, so I had little to add on to what Andy had answered. I could have better prepared for this section by reading up on what my groupmates had come up with for the solutions. Although I had also prepared a segment, I did not present it and hence I was unsure of how Joon Wai had decided to interpret my points.

As a team, I believe we had done reasonably well. Our slides were prepared separately and thus there were some differences in the style of presentation. We also had individual parts in both primary / secondary research as well as solutions to our problem. There were some problems with arranging the people to present, if we should let each of us present our own parts, or reassign. We had chosen to do a compromise and did a little swapping around so we did not confuse the audience with too many exchanging of presenters. I feel that this arrangement was the best possible choice and had worked out pretty well.