Out of Practice


Throughout my time at MIT so far, I have extensively developed my brain in terms of science and math skills.  I have come to learn and understand things that I never would have thought I could handle.  However, I have lost a lot of skills that I used to possess.  When I was in middle and high school, I used to love to read and write, for example.  Now I dread writing for my HASS classes because I am so out of practice.  More related to this assignment, I am also out of practice with my presentation skills.  In high school, I used to have to give presentations in many of my classes, and I got to the point where I no longer had much stage fright.  At MIT, on the other hand, I have only given one other presentation besides the Journal Club presentation, and it was in a HASS class.

Therefore, I was quite scared to stand in front of my classmates, teachers, and a video camera to discuss a complicated research paper.  I spent many hours trying to fully understand my article, because I knew I would be more confident if I comprehended everything and could therefore answer every question and explain all of the details thoroughly.  This was easier said than done though, because my article was very complicated and described numerous details that assumed a prior knowledge that I did not have.

When the presentation day arrived, I realized I was only really intimidated by part of my audience. If I was presenting to just my classmates, I would not have been scared at all.  Since they weren't grading me, had gone through the same process, and had not read my article, I knew they would be understanding of any potential mistakes I would make.  I was more intimidated about presenting to a large group of professors and instructors who had more knowledge on the topic, would be grading me, and could potentially ask me more challenging questions.

The presentation ended up going okay, and it has renewed some of my confidence in presenting that I hope will carry through to more projects in the future.

As I learned in my 9th grade Presentation Skills class--PPPPP: Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance!

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