First presentation experience, Angel Duarte

My Thoughts Before Working on the Presentation

Group work is far from my forte, I don't really like trusting the fate of my grade to other people.  Along with that, allowing other people to make choices for me can either be incredibly annoying or rather pleasant experience (I like to make important decisions for myself, but I am also very lazy).  Leaving those points aside, the group I ended up in was very competent, the best-case scenario.  As we worked on the presentation, I was responsible for only my share of the work and was given complete freedom in how I chose to approach it.

 

Jjk Jujutsu Kaisen GIFfrom Jjk GIFs

Working in a group with friends is similar to working with strangers, except that, if everything goes wrong, it’s a lot harder to be mad. 

 

Breaking Up the Chapter

The process of splitting up the work ended up being for more convoluted and confusing than I had hoped.  Originally, we had been discussing the plan for the presentation on WhatsApp.  Delegating work through a text chat ended up being a bad idea, to say at the least.  One person would say they’d cover a section at 7:30, and then someone else would say they’d cover the same section an hour later.  Because no one kept track, the assignment process became last come last serve.  This went on for about a day, with no clear agenda in sight.  That was until one of the group members opened the google presentation and started listing member and the sections they claimed to work on.  From there forward, everyone started assigning themselves a section or two and the problem was solved.

 

Let’s Get Down to Business

After claiming the section I wanted to work on, finishing my part of the presentation was rather straight forward:

1. Read through my section
2. Dissect and compress its contents to the most important points
3. Type down said points into the presentation
4. Make it look presentable and nice with some pictures.

When it came to simplifying my section, most of its main points felt like common sense (like listening to the other person or actually caring about the things they say) so I wasn’t to sure if it gave my section it’s due diligence.  A thing that I took note of when doing my section was something I had previously learned in SLS.  Back then, my professor had told the class that, when doing a presentation, we should put only the important points on the screen and explain the rest of it ourselves.  I’ll elaborate on this in the later sections, though.  

Ironically enough, actually doing the work took less effort then delegating it.  Hopefully this doesn’t happen in the next project.

Learning from My Past Mistakes

Practice is important, especially before a speech or presentation.  The me of last semester, however, was feeling particularly lazy before a presentation in ENC.  Going against my friend’s advice, I decided that knew what I was talking about well enough to do presentation without any practice.  On that note, I was right, all the way until the very end, at least.  When it came time to end my presentation, I didn’t know to end it.  In the end, I ended up making a poorly thought-out and executed joke that nearly ruined the whole atmosphere from my presentation.

With this embarrassment still fresh on my mind, I made sure to practice talking about my section.   After a few attempts, I was able to speak clearly and was sure on how I would word everything.  As I had hoped, when it came time for me to present, everything went without a cinch (except how someone took a fat second to move the slides forward, but that’s okay).

Cleaning up after that mistake was pretty stressful, to say at the least (Shout out to her for not ctrl – alt – deleting me out of existence).

My Thoughts on the Presentations

Overall, I’d say they were pretty good, while also being far from perfect.  Here’s where I bring up that lesson from my SLS professor too.  So, first off, many of the slides were full to the brim with information.  Had these been for a study guide or for notes rather than a presentation, they’d be fine.  However, rather than add to the slide’s points, many of the speakers essentially ended up reading off the slides, as there was nothing for them to add to it.  A harsh way of putting it would be that a listener could put the computers volume at zero and still have a complete understanding of the slide’s content; why listen to someone when you can just read what they were saying later? (This is more of a general statement, since these presentations aren’t really accessible to anyone outside the group presenting them.)

This part is less of a gripe and more of a funny thing I saw in all the presentations.  Before we began work on our presentations, Professor Sinkoff mentioned how she would like to see one or two videos in her presentation.  In response, nearly every other speaker had a video in their section.  Jokes aside, all the videos fit their respective sections pretty well, so, while there were a lot of them, the videos ended up being a pretty nice addition to each presentation.

After completing my part of the presentation, I was able to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Closing statements

With those points out of the way, I enjoyed and learned a lot from each presentation. The presentations themselves looked professional, had nice color schemes, and overall had a nice aesthetic to them. Some of the speakers were a bit unclear or stuttered a bit, but everyone definitely tried their best for their presentations.  I was able to use past lessons and learn a little more about presenting while completing this project; hopefully my group and I had a similar experience.  In the future, I’d bet that our next presentation will be a clear upgrade from the one we had a few classes back.

Nice work everyone!