Not
long ago I had the opportunity to present at a local conference with a colleague
of mine. At the university at which I both work and take my graduate classes,
we host an annual regional conference on leadership and diversity. Due to my
position in the multicultural affairs unit, it seemed only practical that I
present and upon talking with my colleague of mine, we came up with what we
thought would be a great idea for a presentation.
We
decided that since we both have a background in leadership studies, and with my
work in multicultural affairs, we would be able to broach both of these
important topics in tandem. We were very excited. This conference has a large
undergraduate student draw. Many leadership programs in the south-east come to
this conference annually due to the high-quality of presentations and key-note
speakers.
Due to
the population, we knew that we would have to alter our presentation to not
only get bodies in the room, but keep them engaged in order for them to remain
interested and to learn something useful and practical that they could use upon
leaving at the end of the day. She and I were both very excited when we
realized exactly what to do. We would utilize clips from popular culture as
examples of leadership and its different styles in order to teach our lessons.
We had
everyone included; from John Dorian of Scrubs,
to Jack Sheppard of LOST. And of
course, one can not forget The Donald. We carefully selected clips from these as
well as a few other tid-bits of pop-culture genius in order to talk about
different points of leadership and leading a diverse team. We were placed in
the slot at the end of the day to present, where they usually put the most
interesting sounding presentations. The day of right the presentation; right before
we were to begin, we filled up the largest room they had booked for presentations,
in fact, it became standing room only.
Unfortunately, the presentation was
Power Point based and the night before we realize that we had built the entire
presentation on a Mac. The day of the conference we realize that we didn’t have
a cable in order to connect the Mac to the projector. Somehow, I managed to
find a CD in order to burn the presentation to disc in order for us to transfer
this huge presentation with media embedded within to the presentation computer,
which of course was probably made in 1992. I say it was made in 1992, for once
we were able to actually transfer the presentation to the other computer, it
was unable to handle the media and froze up several times. In fact, the last
time it froze up was right in the middle of our presentation.
At the
time we were both crushed. We had people walk out of presentation. Our reviews
were horrible. My colleague refused to even read the evaluations. (Not all of
them were bad!) Fortunately for my own self-preservation; I am in the thought
that every moment of our lives must be taken as a learning moment. So although
we had a great idea for a presentation, and had it immaculately prepared on our
Mac and it looked very nice and worked quite well, once we discovered what the
room looked like the day of, and the inability to connect my computer to the
projector, and the lack of speakers for sound, it was quite evident, we had not
prepared quite enough.
The
take away message for everyone is that it is of the most importance for us to
be fully prepared to handle whatever bumps that may be thrown at us. This can
be presenting at a conference, or in class. This could be meeting with
students, or throwing an event. Our profession is often abundant with road
hazards. It is important to be able to roll with these misfortunes and be able
to quickly adapt. It is more important to learn to identify potential problems
before going in so that you can be prepared. I know that I for one now carry an
8 gig flash drive on my keys in hopes that something like this will never
happen.
By the end of the presentation, we
had a core group of students that remained throughout the presentation and in
the end; I feel that these students learned more than they had bargained for. Several
of these students were headed into the field of Student Affairs, and since we
were very candid about what happened, I am sure none of them will make the same
mistakes we made, and I hope that you will not either.
P.S. One of my fellow graduate students was kind enough to
sit in the front and record the whole thing for me, so that we would be able to
improve afterward. I have yet to watch the video, I am pretty sure I know what
went wrong at this point!
