I had to give a PowerPoint presentation yesterday morning. About 200 people in the audience, mostly graduate students, faculty, and applicants to the graduate program being recruited by the school. I hate hate hate public speaking. Fortunately, there's a pretty rigid formula for these things: give background of project, some theories, research design and protocols, and preliminary results. Then field questions, which is the hardest part since it's not scripted. I was okay for the most part, except when this nasty nasty nasty researcher--whose lab is in "competition" with ours--needled me about some small insignificant point. I was very firm and polite at first, but covert hostility freaks me out, and I ended up just staring at him after he wouldn't let it go. Fortunately the dean is a really nice person and jumped to my (or rather my project's) defense.
I've resolved never to answer questions from that man. If he raises his hand and someone else also has a question, I will ignore him. If he's the only one with a question, I will ignore him.
And to think I nearly went to the b@stard's lab.
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As I read ur post, I got flashbacks of my presentation 2 weeks ago. I had to give an overview of my project too..some background, scope, aims, objectives, design methodology, design methods, implementation, testing and evaluation. It was a half hour lecture infront of my supervisor and an external examiner. The presentation went really well despite numerous times eyebrows being raised, twitching and screeching on paper. After what seemed life a lifetime, we got on to the Q&A session and everything went topsy-turvy then. The external examiner (who was a stocky, almost man-like Chinese woman) asked me the same Q in 500 different ways. At some point, I got so frustrated and started answering all the Q’s with ‘perhaps you didn’t understand when I explained’… implying that she was just being stupid. Needless to say, she robbed me of a deserved ‘A’ :(
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