The life and lies of my presentations

Incident 1:
Teja: Anna, are you speaking in the CFI(centre for innovation) talk?
Me: are you referring to the one mentioned in the notice board?
Teja: ya
Me: How does it matter? If you want to know more about CFI just attend it.
Teja: I am not very interested in CFI but I like listening to you speak
(Me to myself: cool! -with the ego kick I just got- you are doing good in presentations)
For those of you who are CFI challenged - Centre For Innovation(CFI) is a lab at IIT Madras built and run by students for the students. I spent most of my life in IIT in this place.You can check out the website at http://cfi.iitm.ac.in/cfi/ - Wait! Dont leave the page check the site later - anyway its not clickable :P

Incident 2:
Kedar: What the fuck happened to you?
Me: I know
Kedar: You put fundaes to me on how to present and how can you make such a substandard presentation!
Me: Ya man. It really sucked compared to the way I usually present. It was pretty boring. was nt it?
Kedar: yes. Anyway forget it - I am just pissed because I was expecting something very interesting.
By the way his part of the presentation was fantastic on that day

 I happened to do presentations which totally rocked to presentations which are really bad.By rocking I mean - Six months after a presentation made to freshmen I met a girl which led to the following conversation.
Girl: The other presentation you made was simply amazing
Me: What do you mean? You dint like this one
Girl: This is very good. But the other one is just stunning. I dont think EVEN you will be able to make something like that again.
Me: I dont like the last comment but go on
Girl: My friends and I wanted to know who you are and wanted to meet you. We came to know that you are passing out this year and dropped the idea.
(Me to myself: shit! I should have capitalized on that hype :P)

A presentation which was really bad went this way - My legs were trembling out of stage fear.The audience seem to have split into two groups - One group was sleeping  and the other group was waiting for me to finish off. The thing which I dreaded most in my life never happened YET - Nobody ever threw foot wear at me to get me out of the stage.If this ever happens it would be fun to write a blog post about it!

In recent times the presentations usually suck only if I am in a really bad mood. Just before the presentation which I mentioned in incident 2 I had a fight with my friend. I was in a terrible mood. I really feel bad if I make a bad presentation because I miss the kick which I usually get when I make a good one. I promised to myself that I will never make a bad one again and stay away from mood spoilers before I make a presentation.

A little while ago a couple of my juniors asked me to give fundaes on presentations. I gave them a few tips and recently thought that may be I should write a blog post about it. I have asked Sayan an year ago to write about this. He had time and would have wasted it on http://havetimewillwaste.blogspot.com/ but he never wrote about presentations. I guess he forgot about it and I never reminded him too. By the way Sayan is the best student speaker I have seen in my student life.I kept my audience on high (I mean captive) for half an hour but he did it for about two and half hours. That is something to pull off.

I am going to assume that you dont have problems with stage fear for two reasons-1) quite a few  of the people on my gtalk have made presentations before 2) It takes an entire blog post to write about it. If you do want me to write on it just ask me.

The first thing you need to know is - why the heck are you presenting? Knowing this very clearly is the most important thing. Even if the guys who asked you to make it dont know you should know about it. You should know why the audience would want to listen to you.The presentation I mentioned in the incident 2 partly sucked because even the organizer was vague about why he wanted us to present. I should have thought  about what the audience would want to hear. To put it succinctly you should know what you want to happen after the presentation.

If you know why you are presenting and whom you are presenting you have begun well. Since well begun is half done you are half done with your presentation- just kidding. Start writing down what you want to present- write all the key ideas you want to convey. It should be very easy since you already know why you are presenting and whom you are presenting.  If this is difficult trust me you are not clear on why you are presenting and whom you are presenting. Go back and fix that.

Once you are done with writing down what you want to present. I am assuming it is exhaustive and it is too much to present in the time given to you. A one hour presentation should be having about 4-8 key ideas and I dont like making it more than one hour because the audience will probably loose attention. Keep it on the lowerside. Less is more when you are presenting because what the audience takes away is more important than what you give. Make their life easier they will love you.

Now dont say "Oh my god! I have a lot of things to tell. I cant bring it down to 4-8 key ideas."
There are two things you need to know-
Our director professor Ananth keeps quoting this "The teachers job is not to cover the syllabus. His job is to uncover a part of it so that the student picks up the rest of it." I am not a teacher but I prefer to just uncover a part of the whole thing.

Have you heard of pareto's principle? It is also called 80-20 rule. Roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. My whole life rides on this one thing. If you know a guy who is very lazy and still is getting away with things you can be sure that he knows this. What is in it for us? It just means that you can knock of 80 percent of what you have listed and still convey them enough. This is particularly important in presentations because less is more. You will be conveying what you have in a much better way. All you need to do is to just list down everything in priority order and knock off the bottom 80 percent :)
Your aim is to not tell them - it is something else which you have decided when you are trying to figure the "why". You probably want funding for your project or get the people impressed or get a good grade for your DDP etc. Focus on the aim.


Coming up next is   "How to present?"(rather How I present!). If the blog is not long I will tell you something which is extremely useful if you have a tough nut on your BTP or DDP review panel.


I have not thanked the one person who has helped me with this blog in the beginning. He took my pictures and made the header for me! Thanks destiny. You can find him at http://destinydecoder.blogspot.com/ .After ten years you will find his name in theaters :)

Thanks for all the comments for my previous post! Some even took time in pinging me and telling me that they liked and want more of such posts. I like that but I like comments on the blog too :) Feel free to suggest/contradict anything on this post. i know that quite a few people on my gtalk list are good speakers.

Lastly the CFI website is  http://cfi.iitm.ac.in/cfi/