Critical Reflection: Final presentation

Presentations have never been a strength of mine and that is why I admire presenters who are eloquent and have control of their thoughts while presenting. One of the components of this module was to present an engineering problem to our peers. My team, The Solution, had a good topic at hand; to implement smart meters in Singapore hospitals.

A week prior to the actual presentation we had the chance to put our skills to the test through a mock presentation. I will be honest, not much preparation was put into this mock presentation. The slides were done a day before the mock and were just extracted straight out from the proposal. It was only on the day itself my team realised we were not prepared for the actual presentation. The allocation for the duration time presenting was not evenly distributed and it was obvious that my head wasn't wrapped around the topic. Feedback from my peers was also evident that my performance was not good.

Later that evening my team went back to the drawing board, mainly focusing on the slides and evenly distributing our parts for the presentation. That meeting was the most productive of all the meetings we had for the entire project. Do not get me wrong, all 3 of us have been doing our part for the project but all the previous collaborations were done online either through "WhatsApp" or "google drive" (I have proof!). Ultimately, the real job gets done the old fashion way. We even scheduled to have our own mock presentation 2 days before the actual presentation.

Finally came the day we had to present. Personally, I felt that I did not perform as well as I expected to. My head was all over the place and I even made a mistake in the sequence of the slides. Fortunately, I was able to recover from the awkward mistake. The question and answer portion of the presentation, however, gave me confidence that I was able to present the topic and highlight the key features of my team's proposal.

Given the opportunity to change anything during the process, I would put in more time rehearsing for the presentation. I feel that my grasp on the topic was not good enough. My points were not in sequence and probably caused confusion to the audience. It did not give the justice to the topic my team and I presented. By having more time allocated to rehearse the presentation, all the mistakes done during the actual presentation could have been alleviated. Overall, I will take this whole experience as a learning process and make sure I don't repeat these mistakes in the future presentations.