Adam Yunusa

Pitching and Presenting

After completing the key skill, I believe I am more than capable of presenting and pitching to an
adequate standard. I do not see myself as a very talkative or outgoing person, however, after going
through the key skill, I understood the key steps I had to take to be more fluent and concise with my
public speaking which would aid me in this.

Practicing engaging with the audience I'm speaking to and being more interactive with them allowed
me to be more comfortable in presenting my ideas or pitching specific products.

There has been a clear jump in my ability to present as I can clearly remember not doing well
presenting for my CHE206 Pitch, not speaking clearly or being interactive with my audience, and
therefore my pitch had suffered quite greatly from that, compared to now giving my individual
presentation, I was visibly much more confident and managed to present quite clearly and
eloquently in comparison.

However, one thing which I believe I can improve on is the accompanying slides I have, in terms of
content I tend to misjudge how much would be necessary for an audience to follow along with, and I
add too much text. Wanting to not talk as much as I am more introverted. So, limiting the text and
including more graphics would be an improvement I can implement immediately to help with my
pitching and presenting. I also need to try to practise my presenting to larger groups of friends as this
can help me overcome my nerves. I’ve reviewed a number of videos and texts detailing how to
become a more confident speaker, I just need to attempt these recommendations

Posters

In my academic career I haven't had the opportunity to create a lot of posters, but it was evident that
the quality of the posters and my understanding of the requirements for posters were misjudged.
They were often extremely text heavy and over complicated as I had not understood posters
required information to be conveyed as simply as possible but with ample information. After
workshops and practicing the key skills, I have a better understanding of the requirements and the
basics of a good poster, one that is not only visually aesthetic but conveys key messages easily.

My writing is not so cluttered and text heavy. Additionally, I've learnt how to structure my posters so
that they flow easily and the information I am trying to convey is read as intended and in the correct
order. I understand that the text shouldn’t be overly complicated and should just contain the bare-
bones information as in many cases, when posters are presented, the authors are usually besides
them providing supplementary information.

If the occasion arises in which I will need to make another poster, I plan to create a skeleton for the
poster, containing a few simple words to guide my writing, and I also want to structure the text in a
way that it flows easily, and people don’t get confused when reading it. The writing must be large
and easy on the eyes. And the colour scheme should be very subtle but draws attention to key areas
where I’d like more focus on.

Popular Science Writing

Lay summary writing was a new topic for me, and one that I admittedly had some struggles with, as
over my course at university I have had to ensure my writing was structured and contained all the
necessary information, with it being directed towards people of a scientific background with
knowledge in the fields. However, having to tailor my writing to a layman proved to be more difficult
Adam Yunusa

than expected due to the fact I had to simplify terms so that they were easy enough for anyone to
understand.

This skill had required me to hone my scientific literature reading and comprehensive skills, as I had
to fully comprehend what it was, I was reading to be able to then relay this information as simply as I
possibly could. The lay article took multiple iterations to complete but having completed it I believe I
possess the knowledge and skills to complete this again. Prioritising being able to understand the
information fully myself so that I can then explain this to someone else as simply as I can.

I believe I will gain some experience in writing scientific literature for the public in the future, so
getting practice and used to being able to write in layman’s terms would be useful. Also, being able
to tailor my writing to different age groups but still providing all the necessary information is a goal I
would like to accomplish in my career.

I plan to use lay articles I read on Springer or Nature as my measure of assessment as they’re of the
highest standards possible, and they provide the best examples for the tone, language, structure and
form that my work should strive to be.

Researching the Literature

Conducting research and finding relevant papers for specific topic questions and areas was not an
easy task for me nor was it enjoyable, mainly due to the fact that my searches weren’t as directed,
specific or I wasn’t searching in the right areas. I would always receive papers which were very
superficial in the information, and they had some to little relevance and I would struggle to find a
handful of papers that were applicable and backed up my statements. But practising the key skill and
getting support from teaching staff, I had not only learnt methods to direct my searches, but valuable
sources of information that I could use to get primary data.

I had learnt about optimised searching, Boolean operators and other methods, I know I would have
struggled significantly more with any research tasks had I not been given this knowledge previously. I
do believe that I am more proficient in researching the literature and being able to tell whether
certain sources will be relevant to me, I can tell the key determiners that tell me if a paper is relevant
or not.

And I can tell that I have improved by reading feedback comments on coursework from BIO301, my
tutor had commended me on the range of primary sources I had used, as well as their relevance. This
was an encouraging thing to see and backed up my faith in my own abilities.

This skill will become increasingly beneficial in the future as I am required to complete my
dissertation and this requires an extensive amount of research and time to be put into it, so being
able to minimise the time required to search for relevant papers will allow me to focus more of my
efforts into writing the dissertation.