Last week the enthusiastic ambassadors were tasked with the
immense challenge of presenting the following topic, ‘How do my experiences to
date relate to my future career plans?’ and this was certainly an immense task
for me because I believe everything you experience affects everything else in
your life, including your career. And I have a lot of experiences.
With the challenge accepted and task defined I’ll first let
you know how I plan to reflect on this experience. First I’ll cover my
preparation for the presentation, the slides themselves, my presentation style
and my need to smile more! I’ll then conclude by summarising the good and bad
experiences of my presentation.
To prepare for the presentation I made some notes on word
that covered what turned out to be almost the story of my life and so I managed
to summarise these notes into brief points for my power point presentation. In
reflection I realised that this actually meant that I spent most of the time
talking about the things I actually wanted to cut out by summarising the
presentation in the first place! In the past years as a student I’ve learnt
that cue cards are not for me as I tend to think too fast to bother reading
them, the downside to this is that my mind tends to wonder or dwell on a topic
for too long. Normally I deal with this by keeping a few specific points at the
forefront of my mind and then using a timer, I allow myself 1 minute or more
(depending on the time) to cover each specific point. This presentation ended two minutes over time
which shows that In the future in need to practice more before I present.
My first thought was that blue is a friendly colour and I hoped
this would quell any severe criticisms that I expected because I was and always
am nervous for a presentation. I received good feedback for adding a personal
touch and showing my honesty, but this would have been improved if I’d
remembered to introduce myself. The content was wide ranging with an
introduction, story and conclusion. This was the plan except that I never
finished the last slides and was still two minutes over my time. My main
problem with presenting and even when talking about a topic with a friend is
that I tend to dwell too much on the details, but this is because I believe
that ‘it’s all in the details’ and without details anything can be shown as
false. To reflect on this I will take on quality over quantity by presenting
all the necessary information in the
time allowed and to practice this I’ve now remade the presentation by focussing
my skills on project management.
My style feels generic, though I try authentic made, I
present like a grenade, explode with thought but fall flat like a spade. That
is how my thoughts feel when I attempt to present and become shocked that I didn’t
fail, though not failing isn’t exactly achieving. I’ve always had a problem of
talking fast since I was able to talk and beg for sweets from my mum, but since
coming to university nerves of presenting have put my voice box in fast forward
again. I could see when delivering this presentation that my audience was considering
my points, which delighted me because at least they weren’t bored! Then at the
same time it made me more nervous because I realised just how much I’d thrown
at them to consider when the timer went and I still had two slides to go. In reflection
I intend on practising pacing myself when I speak so that everything I say can
have more of an impact, I’ll practice this when I work with volunteers and when
I’m just talking about work or politics with friends. If I attach pins to my
face then I might remember to smile more! And life would be easier for me and
my audience.
To conclude this tour of my presentation failures and
personality traits; my content was broad, lacked focus and could of used the
STAR technique more, but my honesty can win people over if combined with
quality of content. Less animation and more use of the arrow keys would have
been less noisy, and while my body language is open and my voice projection
effective; my smile needs to catch up and shine.
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