Reflection On oral presentation

Last Friday, my group was tasked to give a sales pitch on the project that we have been working on. It was titled Project umbrella. It is a one stop umbrella rental service which aims to solve the unpreparedness of the NUS population in times of rain.

I had experiences in giving briefings, lessons and self- introductions, but never have I given a sales pitch. I was very nervous but excited at the same time. A small prep work that I had done on my part is going online to watch a few presentations on Ted.com and reading a couple of articles with regards to presentation on Garr Reynolds website. I realise that all the talks given on Ted.com were spontaneous with no script used by the speakers. This got me motivated to internalise all my content and practice spontaneous speech. I went around asking what constitutes a sales pitch. I had a unanimous answer saying that it should be one that is persuasive and convincing because what I want to achieve at the end of the day is to convince my client. They told me that in order to do that I will have to first convince myself before I could convince others. I began practicing in front of a mirror and also to one of my close friend. She really help me a lot in terms of giving tips like speaking slowly, and how I should go about engaging the audience. I also applied the power point tips I got from Garr Reynolds. For example, our group chose to express survey results with percentage figures rather than pie chart and our slides were succinct with high resolution pictures.

I was very confident of the content that I was presenting, and together with the prep work I have done, I was all set. I chose to use an informal tone while trying to relate and engage my fellow classmate because I feel that this will allow me to build a connection with them easily. After my whole group was done, I felt relieved and was pleased with my performance. My classmates’ feedback was also very encouraging. They told me that overall my presentation was persuasive and my use of non verbal cues was good. They also told me that I should be more mindful of my language as it might hamper me from expressing my ideas clearly.

Other than that, they were pleased to have seen me improve since peer teaching.

I remember that during peer teaching, I was constantly referring to the slides and using fillers like “okay” and “next”. During the final oral presentation, I cut down on that and was really pleased with what I have achieved thus far. All these would not have been possible without the help of Brad for his constructive feedback and my group members for their critique to make my presentation better.

Last but not the least, everyone in class has taught me something. Their constructive feedback allowed me to adapt and shape the best presentation technique for myself. Thank you everyone!