This week we presented our first assignment at university — in this case, a group presentation for Creative Sectors. I’m sure grading will take this into consideration, so I will try to be very honest in my own self-assessment, in order to be clear about which points I should work harder on in the future to obtain better results. One of my main objectives for this foundation year is to drastically improve my communication skills, especially oral presentations.
In general, I must say I am satisfied with my work. Some aspects that worried me before the presentation — audibility, my pronunciation in English, the energy level throughout, engagement with the audience and body language, which are usually points I struggle with — I believe came out well.
There is, though, definitely room for improvement in several aspects:
The pace was faster than I would’ve liked. I felt that the 2 minutes were too little to get a message with real substance across, so I might have pushed to fit too much information into my presentation. And even if that’s true — that 2 minutes is insufficient — I still need to adjust the content to the requirements of the challenge, without affecting the fluency or any other aspect of a good presentation.
I must take into consideration, for future presentations, that my dyslexia and ADHD have a strong impact on my ability to memorise, which, unfortunately, in presentations this short, is a required skill, since there is no time for improvisation, even if I feel comfortable with my knowledge on the subject being presented.
Three days of intense practice might not have been enough in my case, because I was hitting my target of presenting close to my 2-minute objective only about 50% of the time, and closer to 3 minutes the other 50%. A mistake I made was needing to keep tweaking my presentation right up until I realised it was too late to memorise it properly. Next time, three days will probably be sufficient if I leave the last full day to practise it without any more changes.
Although I know nervousness is common among most presenters, I must find a way to bring its levels down, since it has a big influence on my result. Having confidence in the preparation of my presentation is definitely essential to maintaining calm ,but past presentations where nervousness led to a bad result haunt me right up until the moment I start — and even if it’s going well, the smallest mistake or change to my script can trigger a kind of crisis mode in my head that ends up destroying the presentation. For this, I have already signed up for help at UWL’s Study Support. Hopefully, having more positive experiences like this one can help lower the uncertainty, and as a consequence, my nerves, at the time of an oral presentation.
When I was handed the self-assessment sheet right after our presentation, I realised that, because of this nervousness, I wasn’t able to recall my presentation in many ways — I’m not sure if I failed to talk about all the points I expected to, or if there were moments where I lost my fluency. One strategy that occurred to me right at the moment of this self-assessment exercise is to ask someone to record me while presenting. This will allow me to make a better assessment of the characteristics I could improve on in the future.
Now, regarding our group work, I think each one of us is responsible for making their own personal assessment — I wouldn’t feel it’s my place to criticise each person’s work. But having said that, I believe that, since I took a leader role to try to unify the content, I failed to make sure the final content was more coherent. I think I was clear in previous meetings, giving clear suggestions on how we could achieve this, and I managed to include everyone’s ideas on what and how we would do as a team — but I made the mistake of assuming everyone would do what was expected of them. I should have kept track of everyone’s progress, and made sure, as a leader, that the result was more coherent.
I believe this first assignment, as well as this self-assessment exercise, has been very useful in learning and correcting many things about my personal presentation skills, as well as my team leadership abilities. I hope to put these changes into practice in the coming evaluations.
