Another university milestone reached
Today we had to hold an official presentation of our project work and/or our bachelor thesis, which we're currently working on (or has already been finished).
I created the presentation over the time of last week and had it ready by Wednesday when we were required to hand it in for the official presentation preparation. The requirements were simple: it had to fit into exactly into an eight minute timespan and cover the basics, our goals and accomplishments of the work.
Again I tried to create a presentation which was interesting and fast-paced and covered everything essential of my bachelor thesis. According to the feedback I received I managed to do this.
I think the key for good presentations is that you intimately know everything in your presentation, each sentence and the order of appearance. It's also neccesary to have more in your mind to talk for each bullet to be able to talk about them and not just read them down from the slides and move on to the next bullet. For me this was not that easy because my retentivity skills are not as good as I wished them to be, so it was even more essential to practice the whole presentation a few times before, preferably even over the course of several days. And it's also important to not learn full sentences to talk but hang on to keywords and topics for each point you want to talk about. This allows you to speek freely and make a much more confident impression than hanging on to pre-constructed sentences. Furthermore, try to not stand still but move a bit, even if it's just a few centimeters.
Of course there are still many things to improve. This time it seems that I had problems with my gesture, keeping my hands below my waist several times which makes an insecure impression. But at least I got my Ahm'ing and Errr'ing right this time and kept it at a minimum.
Kudos also goes to all of my colleagues who held their presentation together with me. All of them were excellent, well prepared and within the given timeframe with only minor points of potential criticism. For me personally most notably was Ellla who I remember as extremely nervous and on the edge of despair when only thinking of having to present something about two years ago. Today she was just self-confidend, fluid speaking and well prepared on stage with only very minor traces of nervosness. One of the best improvements of all of us.
Sure, we all were extemely nervous before today. That's because we attended another presentation of bachelor thesises about a year ago (?) and we remember those candidates' presentations to be on the whole range from a Steve-Jobs-like presentation to almost helpless stammering (boy, this was really ugly at that time) on stage for the required length of time. And it was a much larger audience at that time because our classes were required to attend these presentations as a preparation for today. Today in contrast there were just we, our supervising teachers for the thesises and one or two more officials from the university. Small and well-known audience.
It's been a successful day for all of us, yay! :)