At the end of my presentation, Tim teacher said “tai hao le” when I sent my handout to him. Instantaneously, I felt my work paid off.
Of importance is that I spent 7 days (not net time) preparing the 3-minutes presentation. As far as I am concerned, 3-minutes presentation means more than an oral English text, and it brings me an absolutely good opportunity to practice. Just as Tim said, “we treat it as a practice rather than a test, and we are here for fun”. Actually, we have learned a lot from the practice.
The following is the procedure of my preparation. At the beginning, about a week ago, I chose the topic” how to elaborate a perfect resume”, based on my relevant materials. Later, I made ppt slides, and It cost less time. After that I wrote the handout associated with ppt slides for a whole morning. However, I found a quite number of problems existed when I related my handout to ppt slides. Consequently, I had to modify them. Among modifications were deletions, additions, transformations and so on. Beyond imagination, the process of modification cost me more time. In the following days, I had been practicing the presentation. Firstly, I needed to turn to the handout since forgetting words were usual. Gradually, I could tell the topic fluently, abandoning the handout. Lately, I discovered interactions with audience were lacked, so I designed some special interactions plot into the presentation, and then tried the effect. Then I practiced for no less than 30 times, in class, before sleeping, even when walking. Another key point is that I had to suppose the scene and tried eye contact, body language, meanwhile controlling time. At last, I typed my handout and copied them for audience. Just one hour before presentation, a bug occurred. When I read my handout again, I found a spelling error. What should I do? I spent a quarter correcting the error one by one.
Why did I spare no efforts to prepare the presentation? One key reason is that I am inspired by lecture preparation experience of Bill gates. Early spring this year, Bill gates was invited to make a lecture by his alma mater-- Harvard University. For the lecture, he prepared for half a year. You can’t imagine such a famous figure spent such a long time preparing a lecture. At the start, he discussed how to choose an appropriate subject with his team workers. Then he collected sufficient relevant materials for his lecture. Even he asked help from famous figures such as Warren Buffett etc. when the handout was completed, he tried practicing it in his office, at home, even on holiday. As a result, he addresses a perfect lecture in Harvard University, and he also received an honorary PhD degree granted by Harvard University.
I thank Bill gates, Tim teacher, my partner Y. J. ZHANG, and my career teacher N. HUANG with Intel and H. LI with Deloitte, and they all contributed to my presentation.
