Northrop Grumman Presentation – School Stuff

So occasionally there is this thing called school that crops up in my day to day activities lol. Here’s a little about one of my most recent presentations. I’ve put my slides in along with the story, this is the second slide of the presentation and I haven’t included all slides, but most are here.

Alright so I’ve got a lot of posts and blogs about other stuff…pretty much everything else besides school and school work. HOWEVER, I definitely have learned a lot

After showing up this past Tuesday with a complete and “ballin’presentation…okay maybe not ballin…but better than anything I’ve done thus far this semester. So I arrive to class at 11:30 on Tuesday and I am ready and pretty excited to present to be honest. But what happened instead was, “ohhh…I’m sorry you’re suppose to present on Thursday at 8:10am.” I was loving the clear schedule (really not so clear), I was just glad that more than one student had trouble understanding the schedule and was confused. I had spent a good amount of time on this thing to be ready for Tuesday…probably the most time I’ve spent on a presentation thus far. That’s for two reasons:

1. All my other presentations have been group presentations

2. This is my first presentation that is on my own (between 8-10min) and had fun doing some extra stuff (design etc..although still simple).

Alright, so now I’ve got it clear that my presentation is on Thursday. I think my  biggest frustration was that the first section (that I thought I had to do) I understood clearly and could really present on this subject and it made sense. Not so much with the second one. My second presentation topic dealt with the Human Resources strategy of a company of my choosing. This was pretty difficult because very few companies, beyond hotel’s where their human resources / relations are the firs thing customers see and interact with, post how they go about hiring, what they look for, etc. But I tried my best to use my experience from working at the Northrop Grumman IT headquarters in Northern, Virginia.

So, I spent a lot of time simply trying to understand and make the question make sense to me so that I could really answer the question and not just pull stuff from thin air. Finally, after speaking with another student doing the same subject, it began to make sense. I needed to incorporate the three different pieces of HR and how they relate / support / enable the strategy of the company. I was unsure, until this point, what exactly I was suppose to do. The instructions for the assignment were pretty vague and the students I’ve spoken to had some difficulties understanding exactly what the professor was looking for. In the end we each decided to do it the best we knew how and that has seemed to work out well.

After a late night last night, Wednesday night…(I was here when the cleaning staff arrived at 5am…let’s just put it that way). I finished and was pretty happy with my presentation. I finally got to present today and I think it went well. It was really cool because after my presentation we had a break and a lot of the other students were telling me, “You sounded so much like a teacher, we really liked the presentation!” I immediately thought of one of my mentors who’s been putting the teaching bug in my ear, Ms. Karen Hatter, and I just smiled while thinking of her. I definitely believe I have a knack for teaching and being able to make sometimes un-relatable material relatable. And I have begun to think more and more of not necessarily becoming a teacher but having that be a key role or function in my job. For me it’s fun. I mean for this presentation I took the approach, “So what!?”

I find that, often with presentations, I’m sitting there at the end thinking okay…how does this relate to the reading and alright were they able to make this relatable to a company or organization outside of the book. I think it’s really helpful to step away from the book, although important to reference it, to better exemplify what you mean and make material make sense to those you’re talking to. I always try to simplify unnecessary and bloated vocabulary in books that are often literally very accurate but become confusing when spoken. This also depends on your audience. A lot of the students here are non-native English speaking students. I gotta say I really admire this. I mean it would be like okay, go give a presentation in Spanish for me. I know I’d be nervous as hell and that if someone were giving a presentation I would really value them simplifying and making real examples.