OP Reflections

Oral presentations are an important skill for everyone to learn so it is the most fitting that our course has a section on it. My group did our presentation on building bicycling lanes in Singapore. I talked about and gave our background and introduced the problem of unsafe cycling in Singapore. Only nature lovers will care about pangolins becoming roadkill. When cyclists become roadkill, it becomes frontpage news and everyone will go talking about how the deaths can be so easily prevented. Thus, I argued that a safe cycling environment is surely needed for the cycling community in Singapore and the implementation of bicycling lanes in Singapore would help to solve this problem. Li Koon talked about the benefits, options and drawbacks and Seng Leng talked about our sources and survey.

Like everyone else, we designed and wrote up our slides for our parts and Li Koon would organize them and compile all of them together. The dry run was quite uneventful, except that Li Koon and Seng Leng found time to insert an April Fool’s joke into our dry run slides since the dry run was on April 1st. Basically, Seng Leng made the audience think that we found nothing for our proposal. But, sadly due of lack of coordination, the audience didn’t get the joke. The April Fools slide was on the screen before the audience perceived the joke was there. Thankfully, we removed that before the actual presentation or else we will be the FOOLS instead. Besides the dry run, I rehearsed my part with Dr. Jaidev on the day before the actual presentation. She helped me with the correct pronunciation of some of the words I was going to use. Thanks! The animation of my slides were done on quite short notice, thus I ditched my cue cards for my actual oral presentation and looked at the screen instead. Coordinating the animinations with the clicker and talking was a bit difficult as I have not rehearsed that. Hopefully with more preparation I can get used to this.

Everyone improved from their dry run and including me who have grown in confidence and familiarity with every rehearsal. (No, I didn’t crack that sweet to gain attention. How to talk with it in my mouth?) As for my group members, Li Koon did fine with his part whereas Seng Leng appeared to be quite natural and was engaging the audience (he was even more engaging in the dry run). Now, I wish that my lecturers were just as engaging as him I will be less bored during lecturers. (Yes I do expect lectures to be entertaining; otherwise I will be googling on my Iphone.)

Everyone knows the need for preparation like check whether the equipment was working, or rehearses their slides but do they check whether they have a working file which can be read by the computer? You probably do not want to find out that your only copy of your presentation slides is corrupted and can’t be read when you are about to begin your presentation. Unfortunately, that happened to Xiuxian et al as they were unable to load their slides. Luckily, Malcolm was able to fix the perplexing problem and got them back on track for their presentation. Perhaps a career as an IT guru awaits for him? Hmmm.. Way to go, but you won’t always have an IT guru to rescue you from doomsday. Always have a backup plan!

We should always keep in mind that the purpose of an OP 90% of the time is to convince the audience that your viewpoint is the best thing since sliced bread. I felt Charles did it for his group as he tried to prove that nuclear energy is the way to go for sustainable Singapore. (Yes, nuclear power in Singapore, together with the usual jibes that Singapore will be finished like the Roman Empire if something screws up like in Japan). He tried to show that Singapore would be a much more safer place to place the nuclear plant and it would be more safer with improved technology. He showed us that the Japanese disaster wasn’t not inevitable, and what caused the disaster was incompetence, corruption and irresponsibility (Where do I have heard this before?). Hmm, perhaps that sounded like a not so bad idea after all. I would like to see him debating and converting nuclear skeptics though. Of course I hope that you guys were convinced as well by our presentation as well.

Of coruse, for an OP, you need to be calm and get prepared and so that you can relax. The more you get tense, the more mistakes you make. Listening to Ying Hui speech, I noticed that she did fumbled and skipped over some of her points. She need to chill out more so that she gets less nervous and makes less errors. Hey, mate, you are not the lamb waiting to get sacrificed in the altar.

I learnt something very interesting in the course of XiuXian et al's dry run. During her dry run Xiuxian adopted a “Ficus leaf” posture. Something like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Figs are mentioned in the bible and other religions as well. Incidentally, they are one of my favourite extant plant groups as they have an interesting life history and ecology. ). It turns out adopting such a posture basically screams :” I am feeling very insecure and defensive. I am so freaked out” Not such a good signal to send out. Anyway, it is also not a very good posture to adopt outside of the OP as well. You will give people the impression that you are powerless.

Thus, in the course of giving OPs and watching other people do it. We have learnt what to do and not to do in an cause of giving OPs. It will be very useful for us in our future working life.