Reflection on COMM 305

I approached my ePortfolio this semester with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. While I had previously considering my online profile as an asset in my current and future career searches, I initially felt the same tug of shyness that scuttled past efforts to push out something personal into the public sphere. Thankfully, the scaffolding of different projects allowed me to spend less time worrying and more time doing. Through crafting and sharing my course assignments, I was more sure-footed in offering that content for a wider audience. The doubt over what I should share was replaced by an understanding of what was expected and anticipated for the course. With that ice broken, I now feel more at ease with offering other snippets and displays related to my professional goals and ambitions.

I felt most proud of my briefing report assignment. Pulling together a list of guidelines for effective nonverbal communication allowed me to exercise the knowledge I’d gained in the course while also providing me with practical methods that would like to make use of in my own job. And at the end, I had an original document with my name on it to submit as evidence of my understanding for the concepts I’d discussed, and my capacity to summarize and explain those ideas with clarity. As a professional writing major, it is hard to hope for a better outcome from an assignment.

Even with the protection of required assignment deadlines to push me forward, that innate shyness did give me difficulty when taping my professional summary video. Writing has long been an isolated, comforting exercise. Speaking, and speaking publicly, are much more difficult. I practiced my script for several days to reach a conversational tone, but I still felt ill at ease once the “record” light lit up. Like other skills, I am confident that the best means of improvement comes through practice. To become a more polished and stable speaker, I believe the best cure is more exposure. I am in the process of recording a new version of my video for future use, and I have already grown more at home with watching and re-watching my performances to key in on areas for refinement. This is the greatest advice I would offer to future students. I began rehearsing for my video a week prior to my final submission. Earlier would be better — analyze the recording for changes, and then record again, again, and again until the final product is shining.

The greatest success in the ePortfolio for me came in how it helped me contextualize the theories and models discussed this semester through a personal lens. Reading about verbal and nonverbal cues, I considered how those factored into my writing and my video presence. I looked at my ePortfolio and questioned how well I was communicating, and how wide an audience I was reaching. I now have a foundation to rework and advance through graduation and beyond, and I plan to capitalize on it.