Critical Reflection

This course has been both incredibly insightful as well as challenging for me. At the beginning of the semester, I set myself the goal to become more confident speaking in front of a large audience. While I feel I have made some progress and am proud of my growth, there are definitely areas for improvement. Initially, I found it extremely awkward to maintain eye contact with the audience and struggled with maintaining my train of thought while standing in front of an audience, feeling vulnerable and exposed. However, throughout the semester, I have managed to overcome this by transforming my nervous energy into a positive force. Before speaking, I constantly remind myself that I am the most knowledgeable person in the room and all I am doing is sharing that information with the class. In addition, rather than think of myself as feeling nervous, I think of myself as enthusiastic and excited. This has helped tremendously with my confidence and even seems to help me become more focused and organised. Also, I have practiced extensively before each speaking occasion, where I even rehearsed in front of my close family and friends. This helped me feel more comfortable with what I was saying and allowed me to practice maintaining eye contact. However, I feel that there are still areas for improvement, particularly in my stance while speaking. I realised that mobility has to be practiced as well, an element that I had taken for granted, where even though I rehearsed and prepared, I had done it while sitting down. This simple difference made speaking in public while standing up more nerve-wrecking, where I struggled with coordinating my movement, my speech and my train of thought, which affected the fluency of my speech. Moving forward, I will be more conscious about practicing my stance and movement before speaking to ensure that everything feels natural.

This course has also redefined my perspective of what it means to have writing skills. I had previously thought that everyone's style was fixed and unique, particularly because I have limited experience in academic writing and have only essay pieces and reflections. However, I have learnt over the semester that while there are various ways to write, there are also certain rules to follow. One interesting takeaway was learning to write with my own unique style while still varying the tonality required when writing to different stakeholders, where each writing piece differed based on the receiver. I have learnt that writing styles are fluid, and will have to change according to time, experience, content and context, and although I can still find a style that suits me, I cannot limit myself to writing in a certain way. This was reinforced when I worked on the technical report with my classmates, where I observed that everyone had a different way of writing their content, but one was not necessarily better than the other. Another particular interesting aspect that I learnt was that writing and speaking are extremely different. I noticed this as I was preparing for the final presentation, where I could not easily transfer the content from the report to my script, even though I had written both. I found certain sentences natural to write but awkward to speak and had to make certain adjustments to my script. Moving forward, I will also be conscious about this aspect, whether I have to share my content verbally or in a written form will drastically affect the way that I should prepare.

Overall, I have definitely gained a lot from this course, which has helped me improve both my verbal and written communication skills. Looking towards the future, I will continue to practice the skillsets that have been taught and continue to work on myself as a speaker, writer and critical thinker.