#5 Reflection of Oral Presentation 2

Let me quote from Louis Pasteur's famous saying, "Chance favors only the prepared mind". You will never really understand what this old saying means until you experienced it. Today, we finished our oral presentation 2, unfortunately, in a big, big hurry.

If one of our audiences, Gary, is the CEO of a company who awaits us to convince him to accept our proposal, we would have failed.

To be honest, I admit that OP2 power point slides were only finished before the day we present. There are two reasons for this: first is that we made a mistake of having an interview of the officer in charge of NUS cloud computing, and the date was postponed again and again. The other reason is we cannot finish the slides without the answers given from the NUS officer as we were not able to come up with a solution by ourselves—the topic is just too difficult and cutting-edge.

As a result, we could not find a time to have a rehearsal or some kind of practice. The most we can do is to prepare our own parts according to the slides. Obviously, none of us looked confident at all.

However, apart from the hastiness, we did a great job in the collecting of survey results as well as interview reports. In addition, our presentation skills have improved quite obviously, not only in verbal fluency, but also in the way of using proper gestures and eye contact. Personally, I feel that I performed just like what I expected. I did not feel more nervous than usual, and I did control my part of presentation within the time strain. So I guess I know the secret of oral presentation by now: which is nothing more than PRACTICE.

#4 Reflection of Meeting 1

This is my real first time of being recorded while having a meeting. The first feeling of mine, of course, has to be nervous again! Hahaha. To see yourself on the video is such a strangle thing especially for people who are not actors or journalists, isn’t it?

I have to say, we had a wonderful and skillful meeting (I would rather say ‘discussion session’) on 12th Feb 2010 at Prince George’s Park Residence at 7:30pm. To start with, Sasha, our very experienced Chief Executive Officer of the group, introduced the project outline to us clearly. Phong, our Chief Software Engineer, took the responsibility of analyzing the project and distributing the tasks individually. Finally, as the Chief Risk Manager, I checked the correctness of the assumption as well as the possibility and feasibility of the solution.


Nothing is perfect, so is our wonderful meeting. During the discussion, we had to pause the recording for a moment several times when we reached a point that all of us had nothing to say. This is quite embarrassing, especially we had written meeting agenda at first place. I think this is because we discussed the project too fast; another reason might be we were all too shy to voice any doubts or opinions. From my point of view, I think I was not prepared well enough comparing to Sasha and Phong. For future improvement, I need to do more in preparing as well as brainstorming before the discussion.

One good thing about our group I want to mention is the behavior of others while one is expressing his ideas. All of us were able to listen to others effectively as in nodding head or watching the speaker in the eyes. :p

#3: Resolving interpersonal conflict

I hope you have not gone crazy after watched that video.

Our two close buddies, Opie and Anthony, had finally blew the whole Earth up just by non-stop quarrelling itself. After laughing at these two, don’t we have to deeply think about what exactly went wrong between them, or more generally, among the very group of people who are having the same problem with O and A?

Interpersonal conflict is usually caused by lack of effective communication between the two. As a result, one may not understand the other one’s real meaning as well as not able to express him correctly. Just like what Opie has said “You can’t say ‘voice my opinion’ when all it does is piss you off”, Anthony kept asking Opie to express himself freely while not really listening to his opinions. Is this a good way of communication? Of course not. Opie also chose wrong way of expressing himself, frankly speaking, not friendly and making sense. He always complained anything he did not agree. Such conversations will never be effective at all.

Another possible reason will always lead to conflict or misunderstanding is one’s self-centered perspective. Anthony is such a self-centered person who does not consider other’s feelings and opinions at all. He will say “You are insane” just because he thinks Opie is insane when Opie behaves so strangely. He did not realize that he might hurt his friend by saying that. He kept saying that until Opie eventually retorted angrily. All of this can be avoided if Anthony could think from a more mature perspective or he can think from his friend’s point of view. Sometimes, to let others understand you, understand them first.


All in all, resolving interpersonal conflict is hard work. It requires self-awareness, courage, compassion and patience. And most importantly, think from a different perspective.