Preparing for your first university presentation

Presentation is the action of formally putting yourself in a position to encounter public judgment, or so it would seem to students facing their very first presentation.

For most Bangladeshi students, university is where we are introduced to the idea of presentations being a part of our academic culture, especially if you are pursuing a degree in business studies. Presentations can go one of two ways depending on how socially awkward you feel about public speaking and with whom you are having to team up with – it could go okay or it could go horribly wrong.

The torture begins when your faculty member says, "So next week we will have our first presentation," you go into panic mode because well "Will the faculty choose the teams?", "Do I choose for myself", "I haven't made many friends yet; will I choose correctly?", "Is this how I end up with a C", "Do I have to talk or can the other 3 members do that part?", "Can I learn to use PowerPoint within a week?"

If you are lucky, you get to choose your own team. Otherwise, you are in trouble which almost always is the case. Once this part is done, the harder task comes into picture. Communicating with your team mates to get the work done in time. Now this is where one encounters team mates of various kinds. First there's the person who always wants to drop an idea about how to solve every problem in the world through one 15-minute long presentation. Then you find the kind who never shows up for any discussion but will most certainly come to the presentation and take credit after all the hard work is done. Don't forget those people who'll go, "Did we have a presentation together last week? Didn't know."

Regardless of who we end up with, a few valiant attempts are made to make this stressful week better. This part almost always begins with a group chat. The group chat usually remains silent until the day before presentation or you end up talking about absolutely irrelevant cat videos which will have no impact on your presentation unless of course, you have an amazing teacher who wants you to give your presentation on "A day in the life of a cat".

After a few failed attempts you are likely to give up and wait for night before the presentation to finish the immense workload. Now the night before presentation is when you either turn into the most productive human being on earth or you completely sleep through the stress depending on whether you are the "does nothing but only takes credits" guy or not.

On the day of the presentation everything can magically fall into place or your slides will magically get deleted hours before the presentation.

Finally, when the moment of the truth arrives, you deliver a good/great/okay/acceptable/horrible presentation. No matter whichever it is, you can finally breathe now. It's over. Time to relax. But right before you get too cozy, the question answer session awaits.