Oral presentation

Finally finishing our oral presentation, it was really good and fresh experience for me to work with my team members and to present such a “proposal” style presentation. I am very delighted that our team overall delivered a good presentation and we get appraised that every one of us improved a lot. One of the strength we possessed is the nice flow and cooperation among us and also we can somehow trigger our audience’s interest to ask various questions at the end of our presentation. Fortunately, we handle all those question calmly. For me as an individual presenter, the overall content and eye communication are well addressed; however, since I was doing the conclusion part, it was not a well-structured conclusion which I need to recap more details about what my co-presenters had presented rather than just the outline of their content.

Generally, I learn a lot from this special experience to give a proposal-based presentation. In order to convert a complicated proposal to a concise and completed presentation really needs abundant work especially in in aspects of comprehending the proposal at a ground level, and coordinating and communicating deeply with group members. Additionally, as stated in the video watched during the last class, to follow the steps of Position/ Proposal/Recommendation is very crucial to deliver a fluent oral presentation. And also, I found an interesting paper which articulates the details of oral presentation skills from the planning part to the end of presentation. Please take a look at this web-link:

http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/txie/publications/oral_presentation_skills.pdf

Intercultural Scenario

Intercultural Scenario

  As to the world become more and more globalized, culture difference gradually draws people's attention especially when conflict appears during the communication and even ruins the business between counterparts. Therefore, we need to aware of such differences, and try to make a balance point to resolve the conflicts. By describing the following intercultural scenario, you may find such culture difference is quite interesting.

   Last summer, taking a finance-related module, I surprisingly found that the majority of students were Canadians, and only 3 Chinese students including me. Because one of assessments consisted 15% of class participation, our professor preferred to ask bunch of questions during the class. However, gradually he found that ,as each time he posed a question, none of the Chinese would raise their hands and volunteer for an answer, even if they had the answer in the mind.,. Typically, only the Canadians gave the answers and enjoyed participating in the class discussion. And one day, the professor called one of us individually and asked why we were not participating in the discussions. Then, that student told him because he was lack of confidence and afraid to give the wrong answer in which he would lose face in the classroom. The professor got very surprised why we had such feeling because He originally attributed our passiveness was due to lack of interests in this subject. Eventually, he conducted a meeting with three of us to discuss this issue. After the deep communication among us, we found that our behaviors were, to some extent, due to Chinese high-context culture which people preferred implicit expression of their ideas, whereas, the westerners, like our professor, under their low-context culture, favored of explicit expression, and therefore, he projected us before he was aware of this culture difference.

    In the light of above example, we know that effective communication plays a key role to find out culture- difference related issue. Therefore, whenever the conversation involves intercultural communication, we should be aware of culture differences, understand them and reach the balance point to resolve them through effective communication.

Resume

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Application Letter

                                                           

                                                    

                                                        Ziye Lu (Isabel)

1917，88 Corporate Dr, Scarborough, Ontario M3H 3G6  647-992-0923·ziye.lu@utoronto.ca

FEB, 08^th, 2012

Ms. Marina Joseph

Reliance Comfort, a Division of Union Energy

2 Lansing Square, 12th Floor
Toronto, ON
M2J 4P8

RE: Co-op Financial Analyst

Dear Ms. Joseph,

  It is my pleasure to apply for the Financial Analyst Co-op position at Reliance Comfort, a Division of Union Energy. Reliance is passion for delivering superior quality of home comfort products and services to yield customers’ satisfactions. As a Financial Analyst career in Reliance addressed, the work should initiate to deal with integrated financial issues by exerting strong analytical, teamwork and communicational skills. I, as a third-year Co-op management student, view it as a great opportunity to exert my knowledge in to practice, accumulate experience and stimulate my potential.

  In my perspective, to be given the opportunity to work in Reliance, one should possess two indispensable abilities: a passion for collaborating with supervisors and coworkers，and analytical and organizational skills. I am a financial associate in University of Toronto Forum of China Development (UTFCD) where I enhanced collaborative skills and analytical skills to deal with club’s financial issues. For instance, cooperating with team members, my main responsibility is to calculate the club’s budget and plan the detail strategy to sell tickets for a Chinese Conference which is held our club annually. I am exerting analytical and decisive skills to plan the whole process of how to sell tickets such as being a liaison role to cooperate with other clubs to promote our conference or presenting the detailed sheet to the director of how to run our club effectively within limited budget. And it turns out that our strategy seems to work well because the conference has been finalized and is about to be held on September this year while selling out almost 75% tickets. Conjunctively, as job described, the Financial Analyst position needs the one who can deal with diverse issues by exerting strong analytical and communicational skills.

  Moreover, with an experience of being an accounting and math tutor at Centennial College in Canada during last fall, my basic responsibilities were to tutor students with their subjects in accounting, finance and math and to promote tutoring service via several marketing channels. During this job placement, I made some effective changes while improving myself by doing them. Because the data showed almost 50% students failed their level-1 accounting courses, I did some research and prepared some sheets which provided simplified approaches to solve some specific accounting issues, such doing journal entries, analyzing financial reports. It turned out to be effective since students improved their grades and the fail rates decreased to 45%. Therefore, as the Financial Analyst position required some basic accounting skills, my abilities can match with these requirements. And additionally, by interacting with managers and my co-workers, my collaborative and leadership skills were addressed.

Possessing enthusiasm and abilities in collaboration, and analytical and communicational skills, I am confident that I can apply my skills and talents to handle any challenge encountered. Thank you very much for your time and consideration. I look forward to meeting with you to further discuss this opportunity.

Sincerely

Ziye Lu

An interpersonal conflict

As discussed in the class, interpersonal communication needs people to possess various skills to delivery effective communications. Despite possessing those technical skills, in real situations, conflicts can be still raised during interpersonal communications. Therefore，I am about to share my real experience.

  Last semester, I took a marketing course which assigned a group project of creating a new-to-world product. The project consisted of a proposal, a formal writing paper, and an oral presentation. Originally, my group came up with an idea of creating an automatic check-out machine to replace some cashiers worked at supermarket. However, as conducting further research, we found that this kind of machine had already existed in Canadian supermarket. Therefore, we must create another new product. As time was quite sensitive, we were so anxious and rushed to assign five of our group members to come up with great ideas at next meeting.

However during the meeting, an interpersonal conflict was raised because one of our group members, John, insisted on his idea of creating a phone which consisting “hands free texting" application - an individual speaking into the phone and the phone reproducing the dialogue on the screen, especially when people driving cars. It was a great idea but I told to John that this type of phones has already existed in Chinese market. And then I prompted an idea of creating a portable tablet which combining functions of computers and printers for people to easily print and surf on the internet. Two of our group members agreed with my idea but John ignored my idea and still explained his ideas to us. I noticed John was emotional, sort of angry at me and he would not listen to my thoughts at all. Obviously, a conflict has risen among us and at that point, I told myself to control my emotion and tried to listen up first, and then patiently expressed more convincing evidences to oppose John’s idea after he finished talking.  After I was doing that, John gradually calmed down and was willing to consider my suggestion. And then I apologized about opposing his idea directly at first hand. Finally, we realized that conflict was just contingent situation and our goal was to make our project perfect. Therefore, we agreed to do more researches together and eventually had congruence with conducting a project of my idea. Fortunately, our group aced the project plus the presentation.

  As the situation described above, if you were on my position，how will you tackle with it ?

Effective communication skills

Effective communication seems to be quite essential in various contexts. In terms of job interviewing, possessing effective communication skills are undoubtedly a win strategy to nail down the job.

 I had real experience once of how significant an effective communications are during the interview. Last fall, I got a job interview to be an accounting and math tutor in a Canadian college. Meeting with the interviewer –an aged and serious-looked woman wearing a neat suit, I was originally nervous and acting like a Robert by answering questions cautiously. Definitely, my employer had no any reaction or interest on me by just keeping asking regular questions. I was afraid of failing the interview by having that bad communication. However, sunshine ignited the conversation as I got a chance to ask questions. Merely by asking what are the most important reasons motivated you to keep working for this college, we seemed to reach a common point to expand conversations. She began to share various stories experiencing via her job, such as how to involve in the multi-culture based organization, and even how the college affected her personal life. I was so touched after listening to her real perception of the organization, and added more points to share my perspectives. In such good interactions, we had a more in-depth acknowledge in terms of the job, the college, and the personal stuffs. Fortunately, I got the job offer just one day later. My manager told me that the reason why she hired me was partially due to that joyful and deep communication.

  Above the story shared, it seems that the art of having an effective communication during job interviews sometimes is simply as you show your true heart, pop out job-related topics which raise common interest, and then receive true heart of your interviewer’s side.