Presentations and Purple Giraffe’s!!!

Even though we were only in college for one full day this week as well as practicing our presentations I feel it has been very productive.

On Wednesday we were visited by former student Jonny Haynes who came in to give us a talk on his experiences with the course and what he is doing now. I was very impressed with what he had to say and it was good to hear from somebody who has done this course and gone on to get a decent job out of it. As he works for Technophobia who are quite a large firm in Sheffield I was eager to see what he had been doing since working for them. As he began to show us what he had been up to since he started there it became apparent that the work he does is very different to that of The Design Mechanics who I visited recently. The main difference really is that Technophobia deal with much larger clients and work on projects for long periods whereas The Design Mechanics need to have a quick turnover in work to attain any profit. He also stated that it took him almost six months to gain employment after finishing the course so that proves just how difficult it may be to get a job in the industry when the course is over.

On Thursday we came in for a short period to practice our presentations. We were able to go through the presentation in front of Steve and the rest of our group and gather any feedback which would make the presentation any better. I was quite happy with how this went and I feel that because of the feedback I received I will be able to deliver a better presentation next week. One regret I have however is that I didn’t really rehearse enough before our practice session. If I were to do again I would definitely rehearse more so that I will feel much more confident about the whole thing. After John helped out by giving us a little exercise on presentations it became apparent that the key element to any presentation is just confidence. If you go into the presentation in a confident mood you are much more likely to do a better job.

With the deadlines coming up next week I am definitely going to dedicate a lot of my time to trying to know my presentation back to front!