keninabu!

Presentations

The presentation today for one of my classes went well. Actually, it went even better than expected: a good friend of mine in the class basically told me afterwards that "I thought your presentation was the best in the class". His own presentation wasn't bad either: the way he had painted it out, I thought it was going to be shitty as hell. In the end, it went surprisingly well, except for an arrogant fat bastard who kept asking stupid questions at the end about the aerodynamics. Pretty thick-skinned, considering that my friend (giving the presentation) has a Bachelor's degree in Aerodynamic engineering from MIT!! (And the fat bastard is doing some nano-related research with absolutely no aerodynamics background at all)

Our presentation was for a business plan that we had developed, assuming that the technology we had achieved the technological milestones that we had set (it's still very nascent). The business plan presentation was good enough that after I presented, surprisingly enough one of the judges (a venture-capitalist consultant who helps startups find VC funding) turned around to give me a nod and a smile after I had returned to my seat. I think all three of us felt really ecstatic, in large part because we were all worried like hell. But it was a really good team effort: we initially had problems with coming up with a valid idea, then everything came together, with crucial art work and research where necessary. I basically injected humor, made things likeable and while that isn't the whole point, it DOES help bring the point across.

Basically, marketing and sales only works if you have some substance to back up the fluff and packaging.

I guess it went well largely because I made it interesting and humorous: our presentation was also simple (our PhD had initially worried that we will take a lot less time: I insisted that we stick to the original plan even if it means ending early), easy to follow and relatively straightforward. I had also insisted on keeping the presentation simple, so we put all our calculations and assumptions onto a handout, which our PhD initially forgot to print ("fuck!" said he, as he slapped his forehead), but was quickly rectified while we attended the first presentation.

A number of presentations made a point of including every single damned topic that we had covered in our course, which made for a really cumbersome presentation. One of them went into too much explicit technical detail, to the point that nobody really followed or gave a damn. Yet another one made some ridiculously outrageous claims about renewable energy that I was dying to point out (solar energy for $.01 a kWh, fossil fuels for $.15/kWh and wind for $.05/kWh?? Get real!), but which I refrained from attacking since the point of this class is not to make enemies (our common enemy, El Idioto, was conspicuously absent, possibly to avoid getting his Latin American neck lynched for having made us all suffer his stupid questions for the entire semester).

I am thinking of asking one of my lecturers for this class to write a recommendation letter (or more) for my biz school applications. Hopefully she is impressed!

posted by keninabu @ 10:31 PM