Carlos Barrios Blog Post SPC

 

    Carlos Barrios

Blog Post Reflection Post Presentations

Apart from my summer term classes over at UF, this was my first starting class over at a new institution. Honestly, I wasn't as nerved racked as I was when I first started my classes over at UF but was slightly anxious as to see the difference between the two. I'm not the best with presenting presentations so when I found out that I had to present, no surprise there its called public speaking, I was kind of worried at the fact that I would not be able to do it based on my past presentations I have done for my previous classes in high school when I was doing AP Seminar Capstone. Doing the final tests for the AP classes, I even had to restart one of the presentations because I chocked and forgot my line midway, good thing I was given a chance to restart though. Despite me previous experience with presenting, It wasn't all that bad surprisingly.

                                            The Preparation 

Before presenting, the preparation of the presentation was a bumpy road, considering that I was on a trip to Cuba which had 5 outages and no Wi-Fi on the daily for the entire week I stayed over there. With the limited Wi-Fi I was given, which lasted me around 50 minutes, I had to quickly make my part and send it over to my group. It was a decently decorated and summarized presentation and was pretty proud of it given the time frame. However, not at one point through the making of this did I think to check the style of my groups presentation and when I went to hand it to my team, I realized it looked completely off and was an extremely off putting change of scenery. Thankfully, one of the members from my group fixed this and made it so that it was fitted to the style of the presentation which I'm very thankful for. 

Day Of

Our day of practice for the presentation was actually the day of our presentation which was the most anxious and excruciating part of the whole assignment. Our members were missing our, time was ticking and we didn't even practice yet. When we did practice, we practiced our presentation twice. First time went along nicely and all of our information was mentioned well but just to be sure, we practiced one last time. Our practices, like how it was mentioned in our zoom meetings were to be held in the actual class meeting because it is always open for us to use. And so we did but by the time we finished presenting out second practice run, we realized there were people in the zoom meeting hearing us present which was super embarrassing and had to explain to the class that this wasn't our actual presentation, soon after we actually presented.

                                            My Experience 

When I started presenting, I always had one thought in mind, be present, be heard, be known. By that thought, I spoke clearly and thoroughly throughout my presentation. Although I felt like I did good, it felt like it wasn't the real me, it felt like a robot was talking for me. Sure I talked through different points well, least I hope I did, but it didn't feel like I did it, it felt like I was someone else which didn't sit right with me after the presentation. The comment for my part did help me with that feeling, "well spoken" was what was described of me during my part of the presentation. Apart from that nothing else really came to mind during my part. What did happen before was that my internet was bugging for some reason minutes before the presentation and that had me in complete panic mode which did make me stutter somewhat during the start of my presentation. After that It was smooth sailing from there, no issues with the Wi-Fi and slides only issue was the feeling of being out of place.

                                                  

 
Others Presentations

Aside from our presentations everyone presentations where surprisingly similar to our nerved scrambled presentations. No offense to the people who put in the effort to put themselves out there, but everyone didn't do the best they could in my opinion. I didn't get to see the first presentation since I was still in Cuba, but everyone's presentations after felt either too short or soft spoken and not confident like. Aside from the little mistakes it was mostly fine, The information was good, summarized, and seemed like it was deeply analyzed. Only issues where the presenter themselves, If everyone where to talk more confident like as if they were a leader like a president lets say for an example, everyone's presentations would be a lot better. "Fake It Till You Make It" is a quote I like to remind myself every now and then when ever I interact with the audience. Be confident even when you aren't truly.

Enjoyability

The presentations after ours felt pretty nice though, in the sense that it was a good background audio to tune into. I'm driving over to campus to go over my in person classes and instead of listening to music I listened to the presentations. Despite sounding like it would be torture, surprisingly it was soothing. Its sort of like how when your TV is on and you're falling asleep slowly, its calming in a way. I know this isn't wasn't what the blog post meant by enjoyability in this sense but I just wanted to point it out. On the actual topic of the presentations over all, it was nice to know that everyone experienced a sense of struggle which may sound selfish but I just wanted to know that I wasn't the only one. The information from each group was summarized and exemplified in a way that was clear to understand which helped when I was driving from place to place.

Conclusion

Overall, this project presentation wasn't all too bad, sort of traumatizing for the idea of it but smooth sailing when presenting in the moment. If I had to say one thing I learned from this is that the quote "Fake It Till You Make It" is true in most cases and is very efficient when it comes to presenting. Confidently speaking is the root for a great presentation.