3.2: Orally Communicating Effectively

Over the past few years, Longwood has held a campus wide research day, eventually named the campus wide research symposium. This allowed students of all disciplines to participate and communicate their research and hard work to an audience. In the biology major, this is an important day of the semester and an excellent experience that will help us for future careers and schools. Most if not all my courses have participated through either poster or oral presentations. The most noteworthy presentations of my time here at Longwood would be from my BIOL 251 Ecology and Evolution, one of my BIOL 330 Conservation Biology presentations, and my BIOL 496 2018 PRISM presentations.

In my BIOL 251 course, I presented an oral presentation at the research symposium. This was my first formal presentation in front of an audience and I had very little experience since in high school I did not have many formal presentations. My presentation was on amphibian and crayfish interactions as well as how native and an invasive crayfish species compete for the same prey item. At the presentation, I was able to convey the information that I obtained to an audience of broad experience in a timely manner.

During my BIOL 330 course, my group had to present multiple presentation on conservation issues around the world. One presentation in particular was about Hawaiian avifuana and the conservation issues surrounding them. This presentation was a longer 50 minute presentation but was also had a group discussion and or activity with it. During the presentation, I was able to practice my public speaking skills to a large group of informative audience members, in this case was rest of the students. We was also able to convey the important information in a timely manner and emphasis the key points of our presentation without rambling on and repeating on our information.

During my 2018 PRISM project, I presented my research to multiple different audiences. First, I presented my findings at the 2018 annual Virginia Academy of Science meeting at Longwood University. At this conference, their were many different professionals from many different fields so they knew a lot of what I was presenting on. In my experience, they were able to ask more advanced questions than those of the research symposiums. At the end of PRISM, we had a poster presentation with just the other PRISM students. It was open to the public, but again, mainly people who had a general idea of scientific topics attended. Through these presentations, I was able to convey information to people of similar disciplines and to do so in a timely manner.

Through these poster presentations and oral presentation, I was able to work on my oral presentation skills and talk to others in a biological manner. Looking back at these presentations, one can see that they are similar fields with both of them about ecological concepts. Although they are similar, they are about different topics in the ecology discipline. These presentations show my ability to understand, comprehend and to orally communicate my understanding of biology and how it has expended.

Below is my BIOL 251 powerpoint presentation from the 2016 research day.

Crayfish amphibian interactions

Below is my BIOL 330 presentation on Hawaiian avifuana.

Conservation of Hawaiian Avifauna

Below is my BIOL 496 2018 PRISM poster that I presented at the research symposium and at the Virginia Academy of Science.

Prism Poster_Kish_v3