My First Presentation

A week ago I gave a introductory presentation to 'freshers' at UCL about Rare FM the college radio station. The details of the presentation aren't particularly relevant to outsiders, but I thought I'd let people know how I approached it and how it went...

The first step was booking the lecture theatre, which I did over a month in advance. As a student society officer, I needed to fill in an application form and get signatures from two specific members of UCL Union staff - this is a bit annoying, but understandable, and doesn't take too long. I decided to hand the form in to the room-booking department in person, which would have been a good idea had it not taken me over half an hour to find the right building, floor and office.

Planning-wise, I have to confess I did it all a bit last minute. However, I still spent several hours on it in the couple of days before the meeting. I wrote the information I wanted to deliver on paper, and then, I have to confess again, I used Powerpoint. Lots of people hate Powerpoint presentations, and I'm usually one of them. However, I think that's mostly down to how it's used. Fancy transitions soon get tired, and can never make up for someone simply reading out the text that they've already put up in front of you.

I used Powerpoint mostly because you can knock together a presentation fairly quickly - if you just want to display a series of slides of text or graphics, Powerpoint is actually quite useful. My approach was twofold. For some of the more formal text like 'aims and objectives' and details of the radio station affiliations, I put more text on the slide than I would read out. For other info, like the benefits of getting involved, I left bullet points on the slide for me to expand upon.

I stuck to straight cuts rather than using transitions, and the only 'fancy' animation was a crossing out of the old membership price and the appearance of the new, lower, one (this was crudely done but still got an 'ooh' from the audience). In slides containing simple text or non-ordered bullet points, all the text appeared at once, in slides where the points were more ordered and to be elaorated upon in turn, they appeared line by line. This especially worked for the FAQ slide, where I could leave the audience guessing, before displaying the yes/no answers.

Fast-forward to the day of the presentation. I had taken the smart step of booking the room for two hours, but only intending and advertising the presentation to take up the second hour. This gave me an hour to prepare and sort out technicalities. A good decision, as it turned out, as I could get the projector to work on my own, and so had to call someone from AV Services to come and fix it. I also couldn't get any audio to work, but the blokey was as stumped at me (evidently lecturers don't use sound much). This was a shame, as I had made and burned a music mix intro and had a minidisc recording to play. Oh well, at least the projector worked.

We had a good turnout of students, so the lecture theatre didn't look embarrassingly empty. I forgot to pass round an attendance sheet, so I don't know exact figures, but I reckon there were at least 80 people. The chatter turned into a nerving silence when I uttered 'okay let's start' into the microphone, but I soon got into it and the presentation went okay. There were a few laughs as I interrupted the presentation to show our website, and then had to quickly flick back through the presentation again to get to where I was, with me filling frantically (someone pointed out after that you could just double click a slide to start from there, doh!). There were a good few questions at the end, which I took to mean that people were at least listening and interested. There was even a good round of applause at the end, which was nice and unexpected. Someone even came up after to say thanks and that she'd enjoyed it, so all in all I felt pretty pleased with myself...