P.P Day

Thankfully, most of us will never know the stress that a soldier goes through when told that in a few hours time, they are going over the wall to face eminent death or landing on a beach knowing you have to take control of a heavily armored fortress, with only a rifle and a knife. Yet, for the professional soldier who has undoubtedly performed countless hours of training and had their whole working life leading up to this point. There still must be an amount of uncertainty to how one will act when it comes to the crunch. Even if the soldier has absolute confidence in his own ability and that of his fellow comrades, I'm sure that sickening feeling that they all may share must be Gut wrenching to say the least. Just knowing that the inevitable is about to happen and nobody's quite sure how this situation is going to pan out. Well that was kind of similar to how I was feeling myself on Poster Presentation Day.

Many apologies for trying to compare my own situation to a soldier that has been placed in the life and death scenario. However, nerves are nerves and mine were causing me to get a tad anxious, so as soon as my eyes opened on P.P. Day, I knew I had to get to Uni straight away and was fortunately first to arrive. My First task was to print off a final copy of the speech for us all, so at least we were singing from the same hymn sheet. Yet, to my complete shock and horror, the Introduction was missing and the conclusion seemed muddled and confusing. If that wasn't bad enough these were my spoken sections and I only had 30 minutes to correct it. It was around that time another member of the group showed up who luckily had a first draft that we could improve on, so while they started on that task, I set to work on tidying up the conclusion. We printed it off and made it to the lecture theater with 5 mins to spare. This all sounds fantastic, However, we had not performed a timed run of the finished draft and were  now dangerously running the risk of going over the 15 min limit. Fingers crossed, It would all work out fine on the day.

In Class, we were given the order that we were the 3rd battalion to go over the top and it soon became apparent that we were a man down.One of our members had gone A.W.O.L, which I thought was a shame as they had done their fair share of work in preparing for this moment. Therefore, it was necessary that we divide the workload between us all. I feel that losing the extra member meant that each presenter was talking longer than originally planned. I know myself as a listener of presentations that I tend to switch off, especially if I'm listening to the same monotone voice over a long period. Therefore, an expressive voice is vital for a good presentation, as it "can bring meaning and feeling through changes of volume, tone and pitch" (McCarthy and Hatcher 2009:151) I was conscious of this during my own performance and when the missing members parts were being spoken, I was gauging the audience to see whether they were engaged and considering it was an early start, the audience did look interested in what we had to say.

During my turn to present my findings, I was shocked to see the Lecturer holding up a note pad with the words 1 min left. Another member of the group still had to present their findings and then after that, I still had to wrap it all up with the conclusion. Both of us had to speed up our speech which is not ideal or the clearest way to present your data. It is important "to speak slowly in a presentation so that people can take in what you say." (Cottrell 2013:265) Now we were having to fly through the most important part and just like in a combat situation, running at the enemy with all guns blazing is heroic but not the smartest of strategies. I feel this is were not performing a timed dummy run had come back round to bite us in the rear, so to speak. If we had the chance to do it all over again, I would have condensed everyone's finding's to allow more time for a longer conclusion. I would make sure that the conclusion had at least been put through the first draft stage and I would have spent more time on rehearsing it. Other than that I was very pleased with the poster and how our group presented it and when we finally crossed the finishing line, all the Blood,sweat,tears and there were many tears had now been a worthwhile process that we all had to go through. This research module has given me a clearer understanding of the complexities of a research project and I am now more knowledgeable and confident that when I go into battle with next years dissertation that my research methods will be built on solid foundations that give validity to my arguments and this will hopefully help me to get the best marks possible.

Reference List

McCarthy, P, Hatcher, C, (2009) Presentation Skills: The Essential Guide for Students, 3rd edition, Sage Publications ltd, London.

Cotterell, S, (2013) The Study Skills Handbook, 3rd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.