workshop presentation

Tuesday was a day of 90 minute workshops of which I and a partner were to deliver one. There were two streams of attendees, and so each workshop was to be delivered twice. The one I was presenting in was at about 1PM and 3PM and the topic was ‘what to do when things go wrong’. So I prepared a few different scenarios about problem areas with our software and presented them after my partner spoke in general terms about recommendations and things to consider.

I had fun as the subjects I had prepared for my project were courses called ‘The Advancement of Psychohistory in the Troposphere’ or ‘The Advancement of Psychohistory in modern times’. As report supervisors I had Frank Lloyd Wright, Albert Einstein, Gary Carter, Taylor Swift and Nikola Tesla, as examples. For a past testing project I had added an additional field that had other values in it, one of which was ‘Topic of Studies’. I did not plan this, but one of the report supervisors I brought up had a ‘Topic of Studies’ of ‘Eulogy’. This also garnered some comedic effect from the attendees.

There was a problem in that room that I wasn’t able to correct; the screen on my laptop and the projected screen, though I asked for it to be cloned; it wasn’t cloned. There was a good thing in the room; one of our customers, D, was performing the job of heckler and I find that is always welcome in a presentation to add levity. D is good at doing this for a perfect frequency that it doesn’t ruin the presentation, but it does serve the purpose of providing time for information assimilation. On the next day I asked one of the attendees if they knew what Psychohistory was, and the one I asked knew straight away and even proved herself by saying that Hari Seldon perfected it.

In the second of the two sessions it went more smoothly as it was a different room where the projector and my laptop behaved as they should. What was odd was that the room of the second presentation was twice the size of the room of the first time I delivered the presentation and in the second there were half the people.

The second to last thing I have to say about the presentation my partner and I did was I allowed for a 15-20 minute break part way through the session. In the first one I asked them to return at 2:11, at the second one, at 4:23. The attendees also got a kick out of these equally arbitrary times.

The last thing I have to say about my presentation is that I did get a little bit of unsolicited feedback concerning how well my presenting skills shown through. What I truly believe helps is that back when I was in high school we had ‘Speech Class’ once per cycle during each year of school. This gives all of us who went there some amount of knowledge or skill on how to do speeches and presentations such as this.