Effective communication

Good communicator Visual thinking Good listener Interpersonal skills

begins with careful listening and concludes with a good schematic…

It is pivotal to avoid the common mistake of listening what you think they are trying to say rather that what your colleague is verbalizing. In fact, it is usually the case that people comprehend each concept in different ways, so being able to communicate complex ideas is a skill admittedly difficult to master.

I practiced my oral communication skills quite extensively through various teaching, demonstrating and personal tutoring positions. Working as a teaching assistant, I helped students to get a grip on the complex theory of multi-body dynamics and control for an undergraduate bio-robotics course. This ignited my interest around the process of transferring knowledge in a comprehensive way.

I then moved on to improve my interpersonal skills by supervising students in a laboratory environment when I became a demonstrator in a 3D-printing workshop. This taught me how to manage situations where tension might rise when people are fighting for limited resources and how to find solutions for such problems.

More importantly though, I learned how to provide one-on-one scientific guidance and support to undergraduate students when actively supervising their 3^rd year individual project.

In the written form, it takes practice and several rounds of feedback until a scientific or industrial report becomes clear and concise. During the four years of my PhD, this has been common practice where I learned how to effectively get complicated ideas across to people from different backgrounds.

Admittedly, one of the best ways to do so is using a good schematic. As I tend to think visually, sketching a meaningful schematic to quickly describe a concept is my go-to method…