Blog Assignment #1: 2 Hour Presentations
1. What presentations did you see?
The presentations I observed during the two weeks of viewing senior presentations were the following: Ski Patrol, Basketball, Goalkeeping, Plant Science, Military Leadership, Software Development, Soccer Coaching, Computer Science, Warehouse Operations Management, Volunteering to Help the Homeless, Electrician, Soccer, Information Technology, Strength Training, Automotive Repair, and Money Lending.
2. What questions do you have that haven't been answered about the senior project? This can be about the senior project in general, any components or about a presentation topic you saw or what they said?
My most important question that pertains to the Senior Project Component is the following: what exactly is the hook activity supposed to be? I get that it's supposed to "reel" your audience into the topic, but many seniors had different ways of doing it. Some seniors asked tiny questions in the beginning and others had went over the top with it, such as examples or interesting stories relating to their project. For a secondary question, I would ask, "is this project supposed to extremely formal or can it be interesting and informational?" Reason why I asked this question is that people seemed extremely stiff while doing their presentation and they passed, whilst others tried to make it more relative and connect with the audience by being interesting and breaking things down, yet fail altogether. Those two would be extremely critical for myself to know next year.
3. What has the most important part of the senior project based on what you are seeing in the 2-hour presentations?
To be fair, I don't understand this question based off of the wording. However, I'm going to take a stab at it and say the most important part of the senior project is most definitely tied between finding a mentor and the preparation before the senior presentation. At iPoly, it's extremely easy to talk about a topic for hours upon end, provided that you have the sufficient resources and information to do so. However, I've talked to some seniors, and they tell me about mentorship and all of the prep needed to actually go up there and perform. Personally, I could talk for hours on end about a certain topic, especially one I feel passionate about, but learning the knowledge in order to do so takes so much time. In order to be an expert, you must put up quite a large portion of time into the topic.
4. What topic are you considering doing and why?
There are very few topics in which I could personally dedicate time to in order to present it to an audience. However, the most likely of my topics would fall under the lines of Public Works Maintenance. City management and maintenance have always interested me. Example: if a tree falls in the middle of a road, who picks it up? That may seem like an extremely vague reason to do it, but for me, it means quite a bit. Public Works does a great thing for cities such as infrastructure maintenance and improving the quality of city life overall. It takes great effort and organization in order to maintain a city, especially more populous ones such as L.A or Sacramento. These workers have to be ready to respond at any minute in order to perform their jobs and aid the public by fixing broken roads, repairing bridges, and clearing obstructions on streets and freeways. Of course, Public Works is a broad topic, so I'm mainly referring to the organization of Public Works rather than the general idea.
5. What are you doing for your summer mentorship?
As of right now, I'm looking to see if I could get a mentor from Public Works or a logistician, which would be my second choice for a senior topic. A logistician has proven to be a hard one to find though, so I'll end up finding someone from Public Works should I not be able to find one for logistician. All-in-all, I'm still in the planning phase and gathering info about each one. Ideally, I would like to have three backups which would include the following: Public Works maintenance worker, logistician, or creative writer. Creative writer is a long shot, and still I haven't found a suitable mentor for that field.
