The area I feel that I grew the most in this course is my professional communication. This course gave me my first exposure to writing memos and proposal and taught me a lot of things I’ll be able to use in the future. Even though my grade on the memo assignment wasn’t great, it was the first time I had ever written one. I will be using the rubric we were given in the future to make sure the memos I write in the professional world are up to standards. The proposal we wrote in our group was also the first proposal I had ever written, and on top of that it was really the first true writing assignment I had ever had to do in a group. Most group projects I have had were just presentations without an essay portion. Because of this I learned how to effectively divide up the assignment as well as editing strategies to ensure that the paper sounds like it was written with one voice.
This class also helped me grow with my presenting skills. I have had a lot of experience with presentations in the past, taking a debate class for three years in high school and a speech class at my previous college. One problem I have always had was with the memorization of the information I had to present and effectively presenting without notecards. No matter how much I go over it in practice, once I get in front of an audience I tend have a harder time keeping track of all my information. It wasn’t a nervous thing, because once I start talking all of my nerves are gone. In my debate class it was easy because we had our whole debate outline in front of us the whole time, but that’s not something I would want to have to do for a business presentation. For my speech class we weren’t allowed to have notecards. and I was always worried I would leave something out or go out of order. Coming into this class I was worried that using notecards would be unprofessional, until we watched a TED talk with chef Jamie Oliver. Jamie was incredibly effective in his speech even though he had notecards. Even though he wasn’t used to public speaking in that setting, his passion for the subject made up for it and made him an effective speaker. In my presentation I used notecards, and overall I was happy with the way it went. In my feedback it said I relied a little too much on them so I know what I can improve on in the future.
One thing I also taught myself how to do for this class is create timelines in powerpoint. Below is the timeline I created for my section of the presentation:
