Critical Thinking Reflection

The main goal I set for myself is being able to speak confidently in front of an audience, as I tend to stutter while speaking or giving a presentation, particularly to a group of strangers. Throughout the past 12 weeks, I realized a lot of preparation needed to be done in order to give a professional presentation. It’s the little things, such as maintaining eye contact and having a good posture, that were essential during presentation which I really struggled prior to this module. Fortunately, there were ample opportunities where I could practice my speaking during class and improve on my weaknesses. To prepare for the final presentation, I wrote down my presenting script and familiarized myself with it by practicing frequently and going through the slides constantly. During the final presentation, I felt confident while speaking and did not stutter a lot, and I was able to present my ideas clearly to the audiences. For future improvements, getting rid of my monotonous tone would be my number one priority. When I am preparing any future presentations, I will record myself during rehearsal, and play it back and identify any areas of my speech where I sound uninflected, and try to work on it with repeated practices.

Writing a technical report has been an eye-opening experience for me as I was totally clueless about how much there is to know about writing a professional report. It was a struggle at first, as a lot of time was allocated to the researching process of the report. One thing I realized is everybody writes differently and the way I structure my sentences is different from my teammates. Since everybody has their own ideas, it was a challenge to ensure the report flowed smoothly and made sense while reading it, and often times we would need to go through each of our ideas and find the one that fits within the structure of our report. The one thing I took from this project is grasping the concept of the material at hand is key when doing any kind of work or assignment. Taking the research project for example, understanding the framework of a standard technical report, to how a presentation slides layout should be, makes the entire process so much easier and less stressful. I believe by applying this kind of thinking will benefit me when I enter the workforce so that I am better prepared at dealing with the tasks handed to me.