Infrastructure Presentation Experience Blog 2

Introduction

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Hello reader(s) and welcome to my second blog.  So, for our next assignment, my group needed to make a presentation on Infrastructure.  It sounded easy, but it ended up being a far more arduous task than I had previously expected (for my part at least).

Deciding roles

So, for our presentation, the roles went as follows:

• History and Overview
• World Perspective
• Next 10-20 years
• National Organizations
• Important Events
• State Laws
• Federal Laws
• Infrastructures effect on the Environment
• The Environments effect on Infrastructure

There was a fair amount of discussion over who would take over what role.  For some strange reason, I felt inclined to make comments the History and Overview roles, and eventually ended up taking that role. 

Immense regret

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History, for many subjects it’s a relatively simple thing to explain.  Infrastructure was not one of those subjects.  Before I began my research, I needed to break up the history of Infrastructure into manageable chunks.  As someone who knew little to nothing about this, it took a few days to even wrap my head around the concepts.  Eventually, I split it into seven sections: Roads, Cities, Waste Management, Electricity, Communication, Transportation, and Water infrastructure.

For many subjects, sources only take a few minutes to find.  Once again, Infrastructure was not one of those subjects.  First, I checked the MDC resources, in which I found absolutely nothing.  Then I scoured the internet, in which I found nothing but .coms and .nets.  One would think that the History of Infrastructure was well recorded, but finding reliable sources was like finding a needle in a haystack.  Adding insult to injury, Wikipedia sat like a forbidden fruit, holding all the information I needed, yet remaining unusable due to it being seen as an unreliable source.

After lamenting my lack of progress, I shared my struggles to a friend.  They, being ignorant to the truth, repeated my old sentiments back at me.  I, knowing I was right but still wanting to prove them wrong, resumed my search.  Like a mom finding food in an empty fridge, I found every single source I needed in the span of thirty minutes.  The world had aligned in their favor, proving me wrong.  I had obtained my sources, but at what cost?

Putting my slides together

Now that I had my sources secured, I had to figure out how I could condense everything I’d found into something I could present.  Like the previous parts to this assignment, it wasn’t easy.  My major is Biology, and at a stretch, I do well at most sciences (aside from physics).  Repeating what I said earlier, I don’t know much about my subject.  So, as I read through my sources, it took a good while to gain some sort of understanding for it.  After a few days of procrastinating and thinking, I was able to complete my part of the presentation.

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However, before beginning the presentation, there were a few things I needed to do.  When I had originally finished my part, I only had the text with different sizes and colors, but the slides lacked images.  Along with that, someone had messed with my slides text format and another person injected their slides into the middle of mine (they just wanted to get it done from the look of it).  After being annoyed that my slides were messed with, I put the slides back to the correct order and looked up some nice pictures to go along with my slides.  Honestly, I’m quite proud of how nice they looked with the different colors, colored text really does make your points stand out (I also used it to organize said points, like using orange for time-line related stuff and red for defining each aspect of infrastructure).

The Presentation

I had a lot to say about the other presenters last time, and while I still do stick to those words, I can’t say mine was much better this time.  I also ended up having a lot of text in my slides, and a lot of slides in general.  If I’ll be honest, this was really a reflection of how little I really understood my topic.  I did learn a lot throughout my research, but I still didn’t understand it enough to condense it into a few slides.

Moving on from myself, I did learn a bit more when it comes to presentations.  Having videos in a presentation is nice, its like having someone present for you.  However, if the video cannot capture the attention of the audience, or takes too long, you risk losing your audience. On my end, whenever I saw a video, I would end up zoning out.  Some of the videos would just drag on and on.  One of the group’s slides about air pollution put my 11-12 slides to shame, it had 2 videos and spent a lot of time going over one topic (taking away from the rest of the presentation). 

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That aside, I cam still say that these presentations were a huge step up from the previous ones.  Presenters spoke much more clearly, and the presentations looked far better than before.  While I mentioned the videos as an issue, there were far less videos in these than the last presentations.   The interviews also added much more credibility to each topic, while remaining interesting to watch (my groups interview the FPL worker was my favorite out of them).

Final thoughts

Compared to the previous project, the far due date and wide scope of this assignment ended up being stressful.   The far-off due date and size of this project led to procrastinate through much of the time I had (it’s easy to push a project aside when it’s due over a month from when its assigned).  Due to my procrastination, it loomed over me for weeks, like a hawk or a teach standing over your shoulder during a test.  Eventually, other work started to pile up so I got the project done before it could join the other assignments in clogging my schedule.  Thankfully that left me with a decent amount of spare time, but it was stressful, nonetheless.  Overall, the process to make it was far more arduous than the last project, but the result was more refined.  

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