departmental seminar

So today was present my research to the whole department day. Lovely powerpoint and all.

So what all could possibly go wrong:

Boss is teaching a class beforehand and may be late: check (though he did arrive on time)

Because Boss may be late, may need to ask another prof last minute to introduce me: actually I was just going to skip the intro

Who know if the laser point in the hall will work, but Boss is using his own

Humid frizzy day so no chance for good hair: check-it started raining two days ago

What to wear?: Fortunately I did all my laundry this weekend-apparently its been a very long time since I did it all.

Can't get in the room to set up early: check, though I arrive 30min early, a class beforehand was done, but still asking questions. They didn't clear out until 5min til after I had been standing inside the class for 10 minutes.

Reason we arrive early is because we are paranoid about something going wrong with the powerpoint. Ways we have prepared "just in case." All slides and animations were done on my PC at work and none on my Mac at home because I knew I would be presenting on a PC and things don't transfer well. Not only is my presentation saved on my thumb drive, but I also emailed it to myself. And I cannot tell you the numerous times I have gone through the slides making sure it all works right.

Things going wrong with powerpoint: check

First it didn't look like it would load at all, because this version had the older ppt version...in addition to the new one-so that was ok. But as soon as it loaded, it told me that it couldn't support all the features. So I immediately go through all my slides. Everything looks like its working...except, one complete slide is missing. Granted, this slide is a busy complicated slide, but it shows the data for a third of my research! I try one I emailed to myself, but it is still not loading. My boss comments that I am just going to have to describe my slide. THIS IS A PICTURE SLIDE!! I could tell you what is going on, but let me tell that I would have had a bored and skeptical audience. So I go back into my overflowing email inbox. I have been mocked before for not being better at deleting old mail. But today that meant that I had six version of my ppt mailed to myself over the last week as various stages of completion. So after opening a couple, I found one that showed my data. Though it was not as clean or pretty as I wanted, IT WAS THERE! And so I quickly clean up the mess and inserted it into my presentation.

And I had a really good presentation. I was actually the first to go of this season, when most often 3rd year go late in the year. And it was nice to hear my boss introduce me, which I hadn't thought about at all ahead of time. But considering that I really love any sort of praise...public verbal praise from the boss will bolster my spirit for awhile.

As for the presentation itself, I explained it well enough that my audience followed me and had good questions and interactions. And most questions I could answer, especially the ones that I should be able to answer. And I was actually complemented on doing a good job by both fellow students and faculty. Considering that I don't actually interact with a lot of people daily, let alone those saying good things about me...I had a good day, that I will probably store up for awhile.