Critical Reflection

In my opinion, I believe that having good communication skills is important to allow others and yourself to understand information more accurately and quickly. In fact, in a survey conducted in 2016 by LinkedIn, an employment online service, stated that communication is the most sought-after soft skills among employers. Furthermore, having good communication is important as it is to allow others and yourself to understand information more accurately and quickly.

When I found out that Effective Communication is one of the modules that I am taking in this trimester, I was a little nervous as I do not know what to expect from his module. However, after a few sessions with Professor Brad, I find it very exciting and fun as I get to learn some writing skills such as how to write a proper thesis statement and how to summarise an article properly, which improves my writing skills. For the group activities that we have in each session, we were assigned to different groupmates for each activity. I felt that this is good as I have the opportunity to work with people that I never worked with before.

Furthermore, in this module, I also learn about some presentation skills, such as how to get the audience engaged. There were several mini presentations in the module which gives me the opportunity to improve my presentation skills.

As for the research project, I was teamed up with Amos, Kai Yee and Nicholas. Our research project is about bamboo reinforced concrete. The most difficult part of the project is the technical report. The reason is that it has to be in perfect English, with no grammatical errors or sentencing issues. Furthermore, there should be no plagiarism in the report and the resources must be cited properly with the proper format.

Throughout the project, Nicholas and Amos were able to structure their sentences properly and Kai Yee was able to simplify over-complicated sentences that still fits into the content of our report. I was able conduct several interviews which actually helped my team to get a clear picture on our targeted research topic.

As the actual presentation, I felt that the whole team did a fantastic job. Nicholas was able to articulate his ideas properly in order to pave the way for me to explain my part on the research that was being done. Amos and Kai Yee were able to present their ideas well even though they were a little fast. In my opinion, the final presentation made me a more confident and enthusiastic speaker and the feedback that was given during both my mock and final presentations were constructive and gave me extra confidence to do better in the future.

Overall, I am happy to be one of Professor Brad’s students. His ability to pinpoint my mistakes in my writings and giving constructive feedback to improve my writings is what boosted my confidence to write well in the future. Furthermore, he has unique ways to teaching this module that it got me engaged in his lessons all the time. This module has achieved my goals, which is to improve my writing and presenting skills. I sincerely thank Professor Brad for this experience and I really enjoyed it a lot. The reason is they are effective for upcoming projects such as Capstone project.


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