Week 6

The main focus of this week's lecture of “Personal Development for Computing” was a quite interesting one, it was called “Role Playing and Video Production”, in addition there was an class discussion about the last semester grades and about the incoming presentation team essay.

Role playing as the name implies is all about interacting with other persons while “pretending” to be a different character in order to be more effective than being my normal self. One might say that role playing is a way of acting in a much simpler form that is pretty much usable in our everyday lives. It was also discussed if role playing is actually useful when people are not familiar with it or if they don't feel comfortable with pretending. In my personal opinion I think role playing is an extremely important part of human psyche, since all of us wear “masks” and pretend we are another person sometimes. Some might say that role play and actual deception is one and the same, but I ll disagree. Role playing is just a tool that if used properly allows us to overcome many social obstacles and perhaps even improve on some of our weaknesses. For example, if I got nervous during a job interview that could be the reason I would be declined, however if I adopted a role of a more confident person then I might succeed where my “normal self” would fail. To make a long story short, I firmly believe that role playing is a tool that enables us to overcome any social difficulties we might encounter, if used properly, and if we manage to adopt some assertive parts of the character that we role play (confidence, better use of body language etc) we eventually manage to take one step closer to academic and professional perfection.

I would like to present a personal experience of role playing. As I said in my previous blog listings, once upon a time, I was working in a company that was promoting certain products like insurances etc. When I started working back then it became obvious to me after a while that in order to be able to convince my clients that the company's products were actually the best option for them I had to become another person. I had to be the confident and caring person instead of my usual restrained and a bit quiet self. When I actually managed to walk in the shoes of this imaginary person I became able to achieve a great number of deals and after sometime to become a more talkative and open person in general.

The other part of the lecture, was about rehearsing our presentation in order to make it as good as possible for the actual presentation. Practice makes one perfect, and that was the main focus of this part of the class talk. We discussed that by rehearsing, one can test his body language, their way of talking to the audience and of course being able to stay within the proper time limits. By understanding the above one can easily understand that rehearsal is extremely important if someone wants to make atleast a decent presentation. In conclusion rehearsal's importance is based to the fact that the more someone practices and/or tries to perfect something he will get better results overall.

Lastly, the was some talk in class about the grades of previous semester and some tips and tricks from our professor in order to help us with the upcoming group assignments. That part did not really affect me since I started straight from the 2^nd year so I had no grades from the previous semester and as for the group assignment part I just have to just do my best and practice hard to make an excellent essay, just like a rehearsal for a presentation one might say.

G.