Who taught: Kara

Let me start with the update from the yesterday’s post! My team won the IO Days competition. I was so amazed by all of the outputs each team came up with within just three and half days. I am so thankful that I am working with unbelievably smart people. Where the heck all these people come from? My team worked as much as others did. We were just very lucky. One thing I really liked about my team was the final presentation. Kara already started the whole presentation preparation from the starting point and we were able to be well prepared for what we are gong to talk to the audience. Having said that, one of the best classes I took from Carnegie Mellon University during my master’s program was “How to make a great presentation.” Frankly, at that moment, I did not really appreciate the importance of the presentations and hated the class. But, it turns out that was one of the best classes I took in my life. The professor himself was really awesome presenter. Hearing his lecture, you are just totally blown away by his great flow and connection with students during the whole time of each class. There are a few rules he really emphasized to us.

1. Keep your presentation simple : One of the projects I have to go through in the class was actually making a powerpoint file. The grading system was very simple. Does it have too much words in it and does it have unnecessary slides in it. “Never let your ppt distract your audience’s attention! He always says there are so many people try to put too much in the ppt. Powerpoint itself should never try to talk to the audience. You are the one talking to the audience so that ppt file should be a useful help!”

2. Keep your time : “Time is money! Never waist your audience’s time! The better presenter should be able to convey the core idea to the audience in an easy and simple way and in SHORT time! If you can finish earlier than the allocated time, that is fine.” That is what he said! Of course, the final exam of the class was making a presentation. And, if anyone went over the time limit, they get penalized for that.

3. Know your audience : My program was one of the program under software engineering department. So, a lot of students had a tendency to talk about technologies or methodologies they used in their presentations. He hated that even he was a professor of the School of Computer Science. “If your audience has no or little technical background which is usually the case in the business world, never talk about the technology itself. Instead, talk about what the outputs are and what values they can get from using the technology you developed. They have no interest in how the technology works!”

4. Kill them with your killer point : In a similar context from the third one above, “Do not talk or reiterate what the audience already know, they will get bored right away”, he said. For this one, I have really nice expression. Kara used this one when my team practiced the presentation yesterday night. When James suggested that he might start with questioning “What is the information optimization?” for our presentation. Kara, without any hesitance, said, “Don’t preach to the choir! The whole company talked about it all the time. They all know what it is.” Well, that was correct. In our presentation, we focused on talking about what the problem was and how our application could solve it. I think that was what my team did really good.

The origin of the expression: It is easily acceptable that people in the choir of a church are already believers. Thus, you do not have to preach to them about believing in God. They all know it.

Korean equivalent : I cannot think of any other ones but I think this might be the one. 번데기앞에서 주름잡기! (Beon-De-Gi ap e su ju reum jap gi) Literal translation of this one would be “Do not even try to make wrinkles in front of silkworm pupae!” 🙂 Silworms have a lot of wrinkles and if you try to make wrinkles in front of them, you are waisting your time. Funny thing, though, we, Korean, eat the silkworm pupae.