I had a presentation at uni today. Which is to be fair, my idea of hell. Standing (or in my case, sitting) in front of a class full of people talking, makes me feel sick to my stomach. I was not even sure whether I was going to make it to the presentation as I had the 'lump in my throat' feeling from the second I stepped out my front door. Not only because I had to present but because I still had bits to finish off and references to find. This was going to be a stressful day, not only for me, but for Jess and Amy too (the others that were in my presentation group).
We all met at the library and started work on getting it finished. 4 hours to finish it and practise it sounds fine doesn't it? Sounds like that wouldn't be a problem at all. Only we started to run out of time fast. I finished off my little bots, while Jess and Amy worked on getting some order to the presentation. by about 1pm, we were just sitting trying to get all the references sorted, when I realised I had lost the journal article for one of my references and couldn't find the reference anywhere. Okay so this was major freak out time, well the time I would usually freak out. Yet we decided it would be better to just pretend we forgot the reference, as this section of the presentation was such a vital point to my area. Then Jess couldn't find one of her references, so we decided to do the same again, I mean we had well over 30 references, a couple being missing isn't going to be the end of the world surely?
Now time to go and practise, for this we needed a room to ourselves, we went to Mellor up to the LRC, where we know there is usually a spare room. Guess what our luck dictated today though? Someone was in that room. So we decided to go back down to the bottom floor, where rooms are always free. Again though, no room was free. Okay now it was getting stressful, we hadn't practised it at all yet, and it was 45 minutes until the presentation. So up to second floor we went, where there was a room (YAY) so we got to practising, we only managed to get one practise in, before we had to run to present. We ironed out all the wrinkles and realised we were 2 minutes over time, which would have lost us major marks. So we had to work out some things to cut out, we just decided quickly, as we didn't have time to worry about it properly.
Onto the presentation, to be honest, I weren't really feeling much fear, until I actually sat down ready to present. The whole time Jess and Amy were reading their sections I felt like I was going to faint, with my heart nearly beating through my chest. I was getting all shaky as per when it comes to these things and was starting to worry that I was going to have a panic attack in the middle of presenting. Then came my turn....
I begun reading out what I had written down-although I know this is not the best technique, there was no way I could look up at the class and say it, as I would have probably ran out crying. So I pretended they were not there, they did not exist, I was just reading this aloud to myself. Definitely NOT the best presenting skills! lol. I stumbled a few times, I expected that though. However I do not expect to lose my place and begin re-reading something I had already read out (Talk about wasting valuable time!). But I just carried on, not that I wanted to, lol.
After we all finished our sections, it was question time. I think I can safely say this is the part where we al wanted to scream as loud as humanly possible! What if we didn't know the answer? How the hell would we deal with that? Turns out I am great at spilling out some bullshit on the spot, that actually sounds half decent! I kind of knew I could do that from things that happened in college, but although I appeared confident, I most definitely was not. Yet I pulled off, not only bulshitting my way through an answer but also defending said bullshit, and my bullshit was not wrong either!
So there you have it, my day and presentation jitter. I am just hoping I never have to go through that again!
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