Course 4: Communications in Agriculture and Life Sciences in Speaking

Communicating Agriculture and Life Sciences in Speaking is a course that I took during the spring of my junior year. In this course, we learned how to communicate in the professional world. With several different types of presentations that we had to prepare and record, we learned the most effective way to grab your listeners/viewers attention to pull them in. Each presentation got more complex and longer in duration. While this communications course is not necessarily a leadership course, I believe that I learned leadership skills through the first presentation, which was a demonstration presentation. In this, we had to show the viewers how to do a task piece by piece. I was able to lead others in how to create something and I learned the most effective way to communicate the tasks. With each presentation, we watched the presentations of classmates to give them constructive feedback of how they lead and communicated well and how they can improve on those skills. Even though this class was taken online, it taught me how to be more comfortable talking in front of large groups of people and effectively get my point across. 

This course impacted my confidence in a positive way and I now feel more prepared to step into the professional world. I will be able to now prepare for several different types of presentations that I might have to give in the future. If I work in a field where I need to sell my co-workers on something, I have done a persuasive presentation where I learned how to give information to pursue by not only using my personal opinions, but also by finding facts to back up those opinions. I also will be able to inform others on topics after having to do two different informational presentations.

The first artifact that I have from this class is a screenshot of one of the powerpoint slides from my first presentation. This one was the demonstration presentation where I taught my viewers how to make an iced latte. The second artifact that I have from this class is a screenshot of one of the powerpoint slides from my persuasive presentations where I talked about the importance of adopting animals instead of buying them from breeders.