Reflections - CIP@Jurong East (April)

Book: Animal Farm by George Orwell

1.) Do you think this event has allowed you to improve your own skills (e.g. Public Speaking)?

I feel that it has allowed us most importantly on how to interact with the public, especially since when this presentation was made to be an interactive one. There was active participation from the audience. Some of our skills is to do public speaking and have enough general knowledge to take part in the discussions, thus as we discuss, we do realise that we have to improve more such as to make the event a much more successful one.

2.) Do you think this event has proved to be a challenge for you in terms of laying out your skills in front of the public?

There is always pressure on us to perform well especially since our school’s name has been announced to the public because we need to uphold our school’s name and pride and this week, there were students from both HCI and MGS amongst the audience. When in public, there is always a certain degree of one being nervous, since we are strangers.

3.) Do you think that this event given you a different understanding of the public/yourself (role in community)?

This particular event has given me a new role in this society, which is to introduce new books to the public by persuading them to read that particular book. Besides, by discussing the themes of the book, we do have some topics with relation to current affairs to talk about. Thus, we are able to know what the audience feels about the particular topic. For example, the session this week was concentrated on the General Elections and the debate on if Singapore is indeed a democratic country, as we have said so in our Singapore Pledge.

4.) What were your feelings throughout the event?

I personally felt that the event was quite a success and my partner, Chun Shin tried his best to make this a much livelier one, such as saying that unicorn is an animal during the ice-breakers and during our discussion, all of us had to agree that Singapore is indeed a democratic country or not the police will catch us. Besides, there was an improvement from the previous event, because I think we were given a “private space” and we could talk with freedom.

5.) What have you learnt from others, especially those you are working with?

I think that the most important point is to be flexible on the day of the event itself especially when we meet problems. An example for this week’s event would be that we had actually quite a few parts of the presentation where we crafted wrongly and did not flow as smoothly as expected. Besides, one has to make sure that the audience enjoy themselves throughout the whole event by cracking jokes, as what Chun Shin has done. Besides, our plans were almost abandoned due to the absence of a group member but we had sought help from the librarian in charge.

6.) What improvements could be made in the future (General P.O.V)?

I feel that we need to take note of time management. During the whole event, we failed to keep into the given time. We started the presentation around 3.10 p.m. and had failed to complete about a quarter of the presentation. Thus, as suggested, we would leave at least 30 minutes of buffer time but plan something beforehand in case there is excess time. Besides, I would have felt that a better ice-breaker should have been made because this time round, although the audience enjoyed it, I think that we should make an ice-breaker with relations to the theme. Lastly, there needs to be team spirit, one of our group members was late which almost led to us abandoning part of the agenda, there needs to be better communication in the future.

7.) Are we choosing the right books appealing to the suited audience? Is there a problem? Are we able to address this problem?

For this weekend’s event, I felt that the book we had chosen appealed to the audience since it had the themes of communism, corruption and democracy which we were able to discuss with them as they were mostly from secondary schools. A major problem would be the lack of people attending the event. I think to address this problem, it could be due to the length of the session, and perhaps shortening it to 1 hour would be better. Besides, we have not covered the differing interests of the audience. I suggest in the future that we could do some on Chinese books, or discuss about a relevant topic such as “Weblogs” and maybe moral-related movies, which are available in the library, such as “Remembering the Titans”.