Rolled a Nat 20 on that presentation today

So, today I had this presentation on the Great Hunger/Irish Potato Famine/Great Irish Famine/An Gorta Mór and it went… great.

I figured Nat 20 would describe it perfectly given that I was able to speak freely and given that I didn’t have too many technical difficulties.

In fact, this morning, I learned that the person who was also supposed to present today is actually sick and hence couldn’t make it… meaning that I couldn’t use her laptop… Thus, I started up my laptop and tried running Power Point on it… yeah, it crashed.

Heck, I exported the presentation as a PDF as well and tried using that but it didn’t work flawlessly either… I don’t even have any fancy sliders or animations or whatever in there… let alone videos or sound… so, I took the laptop with me and just decided to maybe borrow someone else’s laptop for the presentation but everyone’s using MacBooks that require special adapters.

Luckily, our lecturer decided to borrow a laptop from our university and just bring it with her. So that was nice.

Given that the other presentation didn’t happen today, I was told that “I have time”, meaning I didn’t have to worry about my presentation being too long. The goal was 10-12 minutes. While practicing (after cutting out a lot of content), I only got to 14-16 minutes, though. Since I had the time, I decided to explain stuff a lot more (like the middleman system and how rations were sold by the Brits instead of just giving them away for free). I talked for maybe 15-20 minutes and then we got to the discussion and questions but there weren’t too many questions left actually.

In fact, someone asked about that fungus that lit the spark sort of after the Brits laid the foundation… and I was actually able to answer how the spores worked and whatnot since I (unnecessarily) read up on that fungus…

We had a lot of discussion and I basically stood there and was able to add information wherever I could on all the topics that our lecturer (Irish btw!) mentioned – and she just confirmed whether I was correct or not. Again, Nat 20. I was correct.

So, basically,… great success. It went well. I’m not even sure whether it’s gonna get graded or not but going above and beyond with my preparation meant that I sort of got a feel for what it feels like to stand in front of a class for 45 minutes and talk about a topic.

My feedback sheet mentioned that I need to interact more with people but I intentionally didn’t do that for a lack of time… Definitely something I gotta work on in the future.

Oh, and a fellow student later complimented my presentation and said that she enjoyed it – and that my English is very good. So we got talking, chatted for a while, exchanged numbers and I think I made a friend today. She seems pretty cool!

Honestly, great success. I worried way too much over this, though, apparently for no reason.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.