Critical Reflection

It was a fruitful 14 weeks of learning experience working with different people in class.

At the start of the module, my goal was to be able to socialize with my classmates and communicate fluently and confidently in front of the class. Hopefully able to improve on my English language. As I am an introvert person who is always quiet, reserved and would avoid social engagement. I am only comfortable in communicating with people whom I am very familiar with. Hence, I tend to always stick to my friends in class and avoid communicating with other classmates in school.

However, due to the requirement of this module, I get to communicate and work with different people. This gave me an opportunity to have more social engagement with my classmates and also get to know more about them. Overall, I feel that getting to know new people is not a bad thing and I was not as fearful as before.

I am not a confident person. Hence, when I know that we have an upcoming presentation during the last few weeks of the trimester, I was very worried about it. I was worried that I am not able to convey my content to the audience due to the lack of presentation experience. 

However, with many practices at home and with my teammates, I believe I improve quite a lot as before. I stutter lesser when talking in front of my peers. Although there is space for improvement, I am glad that I have at least conquer my fear of speaking in front of everyone. I think constant practice in front of friends really helps me in my presentation as they would constantly give me feedback on how I should improve like for example maintaining good eye contact and speaking in a correct tone.

During the research project, I got to work with different individuals with different educational backgrounds. We have different working styles and different points of view. I am glad that we communicate often and express our thoughts to one another. I think that communicating within the group with 3 members is not easy like for example our group constantly has communication breakdown within members. And due to the complexity of our researched topic, our group spent quite some time in refining out the technical report. Therefore, we get to listen to more different points of view and learn from one another. At the same time able to express my thoughts to my team members. Hence, I feel that it is important to listen to your members as we might have different point of view. I also got more opportunities to speak up and let my team members hear my ideas and suggestions.

We did not get a chance to be able to have a presentation showcase due to the current situation. However, during interclass presentation, I got to listen to other classmates technical proposal. Most of them really did a fantastic job, which I really admire especially when they have a strong introduction and able to speak fluently throughout the whole presentation. I have also learned a lot from them and now I have a better picture of how I could do to improve on my future presentation.

In conclusion, I feel communication skills are the skills that will be beneficial to us. I will work towards my goal and hopefully be able to overcome my fear in speaking fluently to people.