The Power Of Making A Point

Monday morning, and I'm back at the Institute of Marine Research. I finished my practice period two weeks ago, but they must have thought I wasn't all that bad to have around, since they offered me to sit here to work on my assignment. And the first thing I was met with was a hug, a "nice to see you" and a very nice surprise.

To sum up our practice periods everyone was supposed to give an oral presentation. Our class had around 20 members and my presentation was right at the end, and for every student up there delivering their goods it became more and more obvious that my thing was going to be rather different. You see, they had all emphasized on the word oral, and none of them did nothing but talk. Well, a few connected to the internet and displayed the main page of their place of work, and the style and manner in wich they did their presentations varied, but still - just talk.

So what did I do? (And here I must stress that I didn't sit there with a smug face feeling better 'cause I had "done more". On the contrary, I felt a little uncomfortable, afraid that I would be judged as a pretentious overachiever.) I had made a PowerPoint presentation, making use of the institute's own template. I have actually never worked with PowerPoint before, but if you know one user interface you pretty much know them all, so it was all great fun putting it together. I'm sure though that I broke more than one rule of making the perfect presentation; too many slides, too much animation and maybe even too much text on one or too slides. And if all 20 students had been using modern technology I think we'd been exhausted, but since I was the only one I somehow got away with it. Although I didn't feel like I did, always beeing too conscious...

And this leads us back to the "surprise". 'Cause the "nice too se you" was followed by "and I heard you gave a fantastic presentation!". "Heh?" I replied. Surprised, to say the least. But one of our lecturers used to work here, as head of the info department. That I knew, but I didn't know how much contact he still had with them. And he tattled...

It's always nice to get positive feedback, especially when you expect it the least.