Critical Reflection

 

In the beginning of this module, my goal was to speak with more confidence during presentation. In the past, I used to speak softly and mumble my words due to nervousness. During this module, Professor Brad had us read paragraphs to the class every lesson. In the beginning, I was still nervous as I was not familiar with many of my classmates yet. However, after a few practices, I began to read louder and felt less nervous when he asked me to read. This helped me to prepare for my formal presentation as I felt more confident presenting in front of the class. Reading the paragraphs also helped me to articulate better. When listening to my classmates read, I also learnt from their strengths and weaknesses, which allowed me to work on my own as I made sure to not make the same mistakes they did.

Another goal was to implement critical thinking into my everyday life. I feel like I have not achieved this goal yet as there are times when I still rush into replying before thinking through the response. This results in my response sounding biased and unfair. Currently, I am still working on this by giving myself a few moments to think through before giving a response. I believe that once I have mastered this skill, it will be of great help to me when I work in groups as well as when I go for internship interviews.

To build on my communication skills, I learnt to convey my thoughts and get my points across to the other party efficiently. To do this, I try to think through my words and think about possible arguments they can make against my point. This helped me to better organize my thoughts, which made my argument more coherent and credible.

When writing the group technical report, firstly, I had to sort out my thought process and decide what is my goal for the day and plan out what kind of information I want to find. This helped me look for sources accurately without going off track. I learnt to look for sources that are credible by cross checking with other sources. We had to go through several different sources when writing the report and most of the sources contain a large amount of information. I had to properly read through and decide what information are important and include them in the report in order to not exceed the words limit. I also had to learn how to make accurate inferences from the sources that I had collated.

When doing the report, I was going through my groupmate’s part and decided to do additional research on my own. I soon realized that some of the information contradict each other and decided to inform my groupmate on the matter. When informing him, I had to take note of my figure of speech, so I do not sound like I was accusing him of doing subpar work. This was challenging as during that point in time, I could not think of any nice way to tell him. However, after giving myself a few moments to think through, I managed to think through and came up with a way to tell him without sounded emotional and biased.

To solve this, both of us decided to find a few more articles on the same topic to find out what was the correct information and make the changes accordingly. From this incident, I learnt that thinking critically can help us complete the task faster as we do not have to waste time clarifying the issue.

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