Students will be able to effectively communicate orally in multiple contexts within the discipline.
One of my first oral presentations at Longwood was in a class called Intro to Ecology and Evolution. This presentation was on the difference in crayfish abundance in still versus moving water. I don’t remember this presentation being hard for me per se, but I was definitely intimidated by our instruction to use as few words as possible. This is common practice for me now, but I do remember wondering at the time how I was supposed to get my message across with just figures. The presentation was successful and I think back to it often, reminding myself to cut down on the amount of text I have in my presentations even now.
Another form of oral presentation I have had to take part in many times has been with posters. One class I have presented a poster in was Immunology. This poster was on phytoestrogens as both pro-cancer and anticancer agents. I have come to love poster presentations, and this one was no different. I like the fact that poster presentations are often untimed and given in front of one person or small groups of people as they pass by. I feel like this really gives me the opportunity to engage with the people who want to hear about my work. This does open up a lot of opportunities for questions though, and sometimes some very unexpected ones. I always try to prepare myself for questions, but it is common to get ones I have not prepared for. I have never really minded this as I feel it always helps me grow and become more confident in my communication and presentation skills.
Yet another form of oral presentation I have had to take part in has been class presentations. I have had a lot of experience communicating this way, especially during the seminar classes I have taken. One seminar class that I have taken is Comparative Biomechanics, and I have had to give many presentations in this class. One of my most recent presentations was on the biomechanics of the predator-prey arms race. This was different from a lot of other forms of oral communication, in my opinion, as we were expected to take up the majority of our one-hour and fifteen-minute class discussing the papers that we were assigned. This was intimidating at first because I have never had to give a presentation that has lasted that long before, but I came to enjoy it as it often led to engaging classroom discussion as we applied the concepts of the papers to the material we were learning alongside it.
As with writing, it is important extremely important to be able to verbally communicate your work in a number of different ways. Thanks to my extensive exposure and practice with oral presentations, I am confident that I will be able to verbally communicate my ideas and my work in any context moving forward.