I survived my first year seminar

So, I survived to tell the tale of my first year seminar! To read what all the fuss is about have a look at my last post here. My slides were pretty much finished on Monday, although I did keep playing around with them until about 1pm on Wednesday (my seminar was at 2pm) but that was mostly cosmetic changes. My supervisor assured me it was normal to be nervous and that it’s just something that gets easier the more you do it. I kept being told that I looked very calm, but I can promise that was just on the outside. I also have a skill of mostly being able to block out the event until about 20mins before it starts, so these people clearly didn’t see me at ~1:40pm on Wednesday when the panic really hit me.

Overall I’m happy with how it went, I spoke a little quicker than I had when I practiced, but that’s pretty normal and I allowed for it (by making my presentation slightly too long) and I could answer all the questions at the end. By all I mean two, but still I felt comfortable and confident answering both, and hope that  means overall I explained my work well to the audience. As I mentioned in my last post I was the person lucky enough to kick the whole thing off, which did end up being  a huge relief, but when I had to start it was a little terrifying! Although I think you could only hear the terror in my voice if you listened really carefully which is definitely a bonus 🙂 . As I went through my slides I tried to look at the audience, and ended up looking to my team fairly often, who without really realising nodded along with me at various stages of my presentation – even though they didn’t do it on purpose it really helped ease my nerves once I got going.

I managed to hand over to the 2nd speaker at 2:25pm i.e. exactly on time, and from then on I could just sit in the audience and watch the other presentations, there were another three after mine. After the stress of the afternoon I gave myself permission to slink off a little early on Wednesday afternoon and got the train home just after 4pm. Overall the experience was stressful but with enough preparation I feel like I handled it fairly well, and as everything we do is, it was good preparation for the future. Oh and it counts for my CPD 🙂 .

 

And finally I thought I would let you know that the Genetics department has got in on the world cup sweepstake action and I got Holland – time to start wearing orange (when England aren’t playing of course).