Evaluating the Oral Presentation

The past month has seen Phyllis, Baowen and I rocket through the ups and downs of our research project. During this time, we really grew into our roles as founders and innovators of SingaBrella, and it went from being just any other school project, to something that we didn’t mind investing our time and effort into. In some way, this idea had become our ‘baby’! Last Friday, all our efforts in cultivating what we hoped would be a stellar research project culminated in the 20 minute oral presentation which all of you were audience to.

My preparation for this presentation included watching a clip entitled Best Elevator Pitch on Youtube, which I have also embedded into this post for you guys to take a look at. Although the speaker was giving only a 2 minute presentation, I was extremely impressed by the way he was able to use catch phrases and numbers to seize the attention of his audience, as well as the smoothness of his delivery despite the pace of his speech. This served as the inspiration for the script that I eventually prepared for the presentation. By practicing extensively (my dog has been privy to multiple renditions of my scriptJ) I was able to achieve a state in which I reduced my use of fillers, of which I received comments about during the mock presentation.  

Looking back on the presentation, I felt that everything went well, and that even the minor glitches, such as the faulty clicker, failed to seriously throw us off balance. In fact, I was really proud of Phyllis despite her mental white out, in that she was able to control her emotions well enough to finish her portion of the presentation where others might have already given up. I felt that the core strength of our presentation was the conviction that all 3 of us had in our idea and our ability to express this confidence in not only our words, but also in our non verbal interactions. This was key in helping us to market our idea as a pressing need, rather than an option that could be done without. In addition, it brought our delivery to a whole different level of effectiveness. Another aspect of our presentation which I felt was commendable was that our slides, save for the SWOT analysis, weren’t overly wordy. In fact, the bulk of our slides comprised of photographs or diagrams. Perhaps we were able to handle this minimalist approach to our presentation slides primarily because we practiced extensively beforehand, as well as the fact that the month we spent developing this idea allowed us to internalise the content well enough to reduce dependency on our slides.

All in all, I think this oral presentation was a great learning experience, and it was a great way to put to use everything that I learnt in this course so far. Thanks to everyone who gave comments, and THANK YOU Phyllis and Baowen! It was a pleasure doing this project with you guys; I really had a lot of fun! J