Day 4: Presentation to the Undergraduates

"Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth"

Ever sat through a long boring technical presentation? Well, I just put eight undergraduate students through that. Today, I met with 2 of the 4 College of Engineering final-year students and the 2 Electronics final-year students doing projects on iLabs as well as 2 enthusiastic students eager to learn about the architecture of the user interface and debugging. The presentation was not bad. I did see one sleepy student, but most appeared intrigued and the enthusiastic pair stayed to the end. The problem was that my presentation was long (2 hours) and I extremely dislike of long presentations, so it was personally aggravating to be the one delivering it. It was an ad-hoc informal presentation just like yesterday. Otherwise, I'd had cut to a max of 30 minutes. 


Since 11th grade in high school, I have been explaining or tutoring fellow students. The one skill I still need to improve on is gauging the comprehension of my presentation or assistance. So at today's presentation, I asked the standard Anyone confused? and Did you understand what I just said?. In general, they usually said no, but I know what it is like to be in their shoes. Sometimes people are scared or apathetic. After all, only one student consistently spoke up to ask questions - solicited and unsolicited. The same student had already been asking my team at MIT questions for a while. I gave everyone my emails so I'll find out about my presentation and maybe get a few other students to be forthcoming with questions.