The absolute worst presentation I have ever attended was… my own. Hands down. No question. Nobody will ever be able to argue this point with me.

A few years ago, when I was just starting in my first professional role, a friend offered me the opportunity to present on a topic that I knew little about at a NASPA drive-in conference hosted by her institution. I was excited by the topic from a distance, but had very little direct experience with it and should be have been transparent about that from the outset.

I decided to take the offer because I was looking for professional development opportunities. I am an ambitious person and I felt that with enough research and preparation I could essentially work my way through the presentation despite having never lived the experiences I was going to be presenting on. I relied on hastily read theory alone and this was a huge mistake.

A huge mistake.

The presentation was the professional development equivalent of stepping on a rake and getting hit in the nose by its wooden handle – only to turn around and have it happen in the other direction with another rake. After 20 minutes of talking, I ran out of material. I tried desperately to save the presentation by having the room split up into small groups and talk amongst themselves. People looked annoyed by my obvious tactic. At one point I even thought about faking illness. It was that bad.

At the end of the presentation, the bulk of my review sheets were marked with painfully low scores and comments that made me want to crawl under the podium and disappear with a party-sized bag of M&Ms. Two gracious people approached me afterwards and told me I did a great job with the tone of reassurance one would typically reserve for a kid who forgot all of his lines in the middle of a holiday play. I appreciated it.

I got in my car within five minutes of the presentation ending and decided to abandon the duration of the conference. I was hurt, I was disappointed, and I needed to sulk.

The good news (besides the fact that this session was not live-tweeted) is that I took some pearls of wisdom from the experience that I will never forget. Those are:

1) Avoid professional development opportunities when you are not prepared for them. This should seem fairly obvious, but it can be easy to forget. Some of us get so excited by the prospect of presenting (or writing articles, or whatever) that we put ourselves in situations like mine above and it is neither fair to the people who will be seeing our work nor ourselves. Challenging yourself to grow is an essential component in good professional development, but make sure it is done in ways that are realistic.

2) Make sure that you have enough material if you are going to write about or present on a topic – and then accumulate some more. In my opinion, having too much material to cover is better than having too little, because at least with too much you can prioritize what needs to be addressed while any excess can wait until future opportunities.

3) Practice, practice, practice! Not all professional development opportunities require you to perform, but many do. For those, you have an audience that wants to be both educated and amused, and you owe it to them (and to yourself) to give them a good presentation. If it’s a presentation, running through it before will give you an idea of what weak points need to be addressed beforehand. If it’s an article, don’t rush it. Take your time, get feedback, and revisit as much as possible.

4) Be selective when it comes to professional development. We are all working in a competitive economy and probably most of us perpetually feel like we need professional development to get ahead in the field. And we are right. But this experience taught me that quality professional development is better than embarrassing ourselves in front of our colleagues with sub-par work that does not make us proud. Student affairs is a small field, right? What we do matters.