I am glad to say that I have completed my final presentation for Speaking of Bicycles. It has been an interesting semester where I got the chance to develop my skills as a public speaker. Overall, I felt more confident going into this last presentation.
I think that confidence is important in determining the outcome of a presentation, I also believe that greater confidence could be obtained in different ways. Certainly being more confortable with my classmates helped me be less nervous before and during my presentation which gave me more confidence. Moreover, understanding the public speaking techniques taught by Mr. Hunt such as: breathing, voice projection, building credibility…, allowed me to be more knowledgable which also gave me more confidence. I believe that this confidence made it possible for me to find the type of speaker that I am and I think that it progressively showed as the presentations went on.
Similarly to my last presentations, in my final one, I talk about a relevant and important issue, stress and coping, in a way that was trying to also be involving and entertaining. Evidence of this can be seen where on the one hand, I advocated for music therapy by showing the research that supports it, giving factual, logical support, while on the other hand I was more conversational in stating that we can all relate with music being a positive factor of our lives, in a more involving and humorous way. Prior to giving my presentation I visited the speaking center which gave me a great opportunity to further practice giving my speech. This was really helpful. Reflecting, I would have hoped to have more time preparing this presentation in order to figure out how to add music to some of the words in my power point slide. I believe that this would have made my presentation more entertaining, however, the visual aids also did well. Something that I have to keep working on is relying less on my notes, I always found that hard to do but, I feel that the more I practice the better it will be.
I enjoyed this round of presentations because everyone got a chance to advocate for something that they were interested in or cared about. This brought out some really interesting topics, from Amandas’ informative presentation on ‘Say Know to Drugs’ to Abbys’ fascinating account of the Filipino veterans parade that she attended. I thought that Victoria had a really powerful message in her video presentation and that it was well transmitted. Finally, I thought that Jack was skillful in advocating that there should be better programs to teach people about guns while, at the same time, also teaching us some important information about guns, nice! In conclusion, I can say that I have enjoyed all our presentation and that I hope to remember them for long to come.