Telling your Story

Spencer Travers - Embedded Design Engineer

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*Talk directly to the class*	Talk about you and your career. You don’t want students to be distracted by you reading from your PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint is an aid, not the be-all-and-end-all of your presentation.
Keep slides simple	Have only one or two ideas per slide. This helps to get students’ attention and keeps the focus of the discussion on particular points. Lots of info can lead to questions about things you haven’t talked about. It’s better to have more slides with fewer points on them.
Rehearse your presentation	Rehearse to find out how long it takes to give the presentation, and trim the fat.
Be flexible	Vary your slides and your delivery depending on your audience. You can use just a picture and give a brief description, or, to fill in time, go into great depth.
Repeat questions asked	Repeat students’ questions back to them: “Your question was...” It’s really to avoid having students who didn’t hear what the question was and so they lose interest. It’s also a good way to give yourself time to think of an answer. You’re making sure you interpreted the question properly.
Be prepared and set up early	The more you have to rely on someone else’s equipment, the greater chance there is of something going wrong. Get your presentation loaded and ready to go before students arrive, because you can waste a lot of time setting up. Print out a copy of the presentation, so if worse comes to worst, you have something to refer to.
Be enthusiastic and tell stories	Try and engage students at a less formal level. You want to show that you’re enthusiastic about what you do. Students really respond well to stories and anecdotes.
The personal touch	Embedded systems are a dry subject sometimes, so I talk about some of my personal projects. I like to pull apart children’s toys, which I buy off TradeMe, to see how they work. Once I bought a Furbie and went to pick it up from the owner’s house. A young girl answered, and I didn’t want to tell her what I was going to do with her toy.