Critical Reflection

I have always loved the English language. It intrigues me to want to learn how to communicate properly. I was very excited about having an English class in my university life. I appreciate and am grateful for the lessons conducted by Professor Brad Blackstone. Those lessons have taught me so much that I am saddened to realise it has come to an end.

Initially, my main weakness was presenting in front of a large group of audience. In this module, I did learn how to present effectively to an audience. It may not be a big audience but it put me in the right path towards excellent presentation in front of a big audience in the future. I have learnt how to stand, deliver points and maintain eye contact with my audience. I believe these skills will help me in my workplace in the future. It ensures that I will leave a very good and lasting impression whenever I’m seeing my supervisors or clients. During the module, I have discovered that I am weak in writing a report or summary. I have always thought that I could write and summarise very  proficiently but, this module have proved me otherwise and taught me how to do so correctly. This skill will definitely be useful to me in my workplace as it encompasses my work to be professionally written. I may be sent,  representing  my company , to meetings or briefings. It crucial that I can deliver my understandings in summary to my supervisors. Apart from learning these skills in the module, I believe that we need to have good practise to drill them in ourselves. I pledge to make myself look into ways that I can improve myself in my English language and actually put them to use, be it in social or professional setting. 

I am also grateful that I got to do a group research project. It was an eye-opening experience for me as it was the first time doing a project with the focus of ensuring proper language usage and effective presentation. I was appointed as the team leader. My team did a project on implementation of pervious concrete on pavements in future developments. The area in which i learnt the most was presentation skills. As a team, we have to present our idea to the targeted stakeholders. I learnt how to create and prepare my presentation slides to ensure it is not only very professional but also intriguing enough to attract my audience's attention. I also learnt on how deliver a good pitch and finally, learnt how to present properly. As it was my first time working with this set of team members, I have learnt how to adapt to one another. I developed skills to find out the strength and the weaknesses of my group mates and help them accordingly. As a team leader, I learn how to delegate tasks and provided assistance in areas that I was able to. It was due to this group research project, I got to develop better interpersonal skills. It also taught me to be more observant and learn from my team mates mistakes as well. I am feeling delighted and proud to know that I was very helpful and tactful with my team mates. I hope that I bring these lessons with myself into the future whereby I will be mingling and handling team mates from all walks of life. 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Brad Blackstone for the guidance and the knowledge that he has shared, my team mates for making the group research project a fruitful and blissful journey and finally my classmates for helping and giving me constructive feedbacks.