Had an opportunity to attend a Final Year Project presentation. The students are doing a project offered by the research fellow in our water research group.
I’ll try to illustrate what had happened and at the end I will give my eye opening opinion regarding the whole presentation.
Fortunately or unfortunately to the students, they got one of the “trickiest” moderator marking their project. This moderator (let’s call this moderator, Mr. X) is well known among the students for not very good reason. I’ll put a full stop here without going into details. For those who had been a student once would understand and can try to put an imagination on how Mr. X is.
The second fortunate or unfortunate event for the student is the students must be shocked seeing 4-5 extra departmental staffs sitting in their presentation. Just imagine before you were about to start your FINAL YEAR PROJECT presentation, 4-5 lecturers (let’s call them “The L”) suddenly came in to listen to your presentation. As a student you can either feel, “Is my project really interesting that attracts lots of audience? ” OR “I’m in trouble as I’m gonna get lots of bullets thrown at me. ” To give a bit more background about what’s the big deal about the extra “presence” in your presentation. NORMALLY final year project presentation WILL NOT draw any interest among lecturers and no one will bother attending the presentation other than the students’ friend sitting at the back giving moral support. So, it’s a big deal .
Right after the second slide , Mr. X threw a question, “Do you guys want to fail?” My goodness! Stating that comment at the second presentation slide will definitely kill the confidence of the students. At least make the comment after the presentation, during the Q&A session. You can feel that the students’ concentration were distracted but kudos to them that they kept their heads high and continued. Throughout the whole presentation, the students were “grilled” by Mr. X and “The L” almost non stop at the rate of 3 bullets per 2 slides. Honestly, if I’m in their shoes, (after the 2nd slide incident), I will break down and go blank. But the students still can keep their cool and defended quite well. This, I’m very impressed. Very impressed.
My verdict
The good:
(G1) The students did a lot of work given the time frame they had.
(G2) They defended themselves well despite the bullets thrown at them at such a rate (See above, in red color bold). Particularly after the comment given by Mr. X after ONLY the second slide.
The bad:
(B1) You must be wondering why Mr. X made such a comment after the second slide. They didn’t specify clearly their objective of the project in the presentation. At the second slide, they sort of jumped into the mathematics jargon without details. Mr. X wasn’t impressed. As for me, I understood why Mr. X wasn’t impressed. Their slides were pretty sloppy.
(B2) Sloppy slides! ALL the figures are not labelled. Axis not labelled. All the mathematical jargon are not explained well. Worse of all, the objective of the project is not well defined. Lots of short form used (e.g. freq., ZN rules, GM, PM etc) assuming the audience know what it stands for.
(B3) No time management. Having done a substantial work, they should have presented the main outline and time themselves properly. I’m left wondering whether the students consulted their supervisor prior presentation. From what I could see,….. NO.
(B4) NO literature review was given prior presenting their work. They presented in a way as if they are the first one who discovered/invented this “thing”. See that I used “thing”, cause up till now, I’m still not sure what is their main objective.
What do I get from the whole experience? Given that “The L” and possibly Mr. X are most likely the same people to attend my future presentation, I better do my homework EXTREMELY well. Make sure my slides are clear and give them no room to say “Do you want to fail?” only after the second slide. It’s a scary experience for the students but it gave me a big insight of what to be expected when it’s my turn.
