We had our first presentation tonight in my Marketing Research class. I tried to strike a deal with my teammates. I would do just about anything to get out of giving a speech. But I was worried I wasn’t very persuasive with my teammates and would end up stumbling through a few slides in front of my class.

Two weeks ago we lead a focus group of our peers in a discussion of organic foods and the feasibility of opening an organic grocery store in our area. We then were supposed to compile our data in to a summary and a final report for a presentation to the class. We weren’t required to have every teammate present. Our teacher left is up to us to determine how we’d work the presentation. In fact tonight there was one team who had just one of their team members present the entire presentation. And another team had just two people from their group.

Each team has about seven members. And the presentation was to be between five and ten minutes long. That means, if we had every team member present, we each had to talk for about 30 seconds to a minute. Still entirely too long in my book. Personally I think the presentations with just a couple presenters went much smoother than the ones were seven people hovered at the front of the class and spoke for 30 seconds each. But maybe that’s just because I was determined not to be one of the seven people.

So my deal with my team was that I would write the entire summary and the whole report if it would get me out of presenting. I thought that was a pretty good deal. I mean in the end writing the summary and report would take a heck of a lot longer than just reading off a slide while standing in front of the classroom.

But today when I received the slides from the teammate who put the presentation together I discovered I was responsible for the introduction and stating our research objectives. My plan had failed. I was going to have to present. In front of the classroom. With a bunch of little twenty year old beady eyes staring at me. Hopefully I wouldn’t drool.

So I was pretty much dreading going to class tonight. We met a half hour early to run through the slides [since we didn't even get the slides until early this morning]. As soon as I got there I got a wonderful surprise. One of my teammate, Sarah, asked me if I wanted her to take my slides. She said, “the deal was, you write the papers and you don’t have to present.” And then I made out with her.

Ok, so I didn’t really make out with her. But she is my new best friend.

Instead of presenting I just worked the computer and advanced the slides while Sarah presented both my part and her part and the rest of the team presented theirs. And then we all sang Kum Bi Ya together and everything was good. Yeah, that’s last part didn’t really happen either. But our presentation did go really well and I am expecting an A.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Public speaking w/o passing out. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.