As promised in yesterday's post, here's a bit of feedback on my talk at this morning's South African Institute for Mechanical Engineering (SAIMechE) (Central Branch) Post Graduate Student Conference. The main objective of the conference, as I understand it, is to help the post graduate students get some presentation experience under their belts, to complement their considerable research and analytical capabilities.

Arrival

I was due to speak at 8:35, so left the house to catch an Uber just after 7:00, figuring that would get me there by 8:00 at the latest even with traffic (it's just over half an hour away outside of rush hour), I wouldn't have to stress over finding parking and I'd have a chance to chat with the organisers to refine the messaging, maybe even chat with some of the students over a coffee.

Happy as a lark was I when I saw my Uber driver had nearly 30 000 drives (yes, that's the right number of zeros) to his credit.

Except...

...I would have gotten there sooner if I'd rungif source

I got the one Uber driver on the planet who completely ignores his app and makes up his own route. After three unnecessary, unhelpful and inexplicable deviations from the obvious route, I whipped out Waze and just told him which way to go. I got there bang on 8:30 and found they had decided to start with one of the sponsors giving a talk, which gave me a chance to have that coffee.

An aside

One thing I've learned about traffic and air travel - there are things you can control, there are things that are worth stressing about and there are things that are just going to happen regardless of how much you try to control them or stress about them. What could I control? Three things: communication with the organisers, eventual wresting of the navigation from the driver once I realised he'd never get it, and my own emotions about the situation.

Had my coffee while the first sponsor gave his talk

So even though I wasn't unduly stressed or irritated when I got there, it helped to have a few minutes and a really good coffee to get me further into the right frame of mind to give the keynote.

It also gave me a chance to run through again what these post graduate students were going to speak about. There was some serious brain power in the room. Here's the programme:

I defy you to tell me what all of those titles mean.

Anyway, by now I'm ready to do what I'm going to do.

Up I get to give my talk...

...and the techie couldn't get my presentation going.

But me, I'm Zengif source

So I talked about what I was going to talk about, as well as telling the hamster story (see yesterday's post) for about five minutes and telling them my goal was to help them recognise the skills they would need beyond those considerable technical capabilities to become entrepreneurs and to create something of value with their lives - make an impact through their lives. But for a fifteen minute keynote, five minutes of altered state presentation was auguring badly. Those were going to be my concluding words, but I decided I'd close out abruptly given the time constraints.

We eventually recovered and I launched into my eight slides. Here's the cover slide to get you in the mood.

When I present something as abstract as this, especially not knowing how much the audience knows about or is personally invested in the subject, I try to make it funny and engaging by asking a few questions directly to the audience, looking the individuals directly in the eye, and finding some connection point with them to get a sense of whether I'm even close to on track.

More than half the room said they were keen to become entrepreneurs (but hadn't started the journey yet - lots of nervous, hopeful laughter there), none had heard of "intrapreneur" and the rest just looked really confused that this was even a topic at this conference. I was pleasantly surprised by the majority of eager, smiling faces.

So how did it go?

If we measure success by engagement, my talk probably went well. They smiled, they laughed, they answered questions, they ribbed back a bit (always a good sign for this kind of talk). When I poked them by saying, "Do I look like an engineer?" one fellow said we should never judge what a person does by their appearance (good answer) and another said, "Nope, you look like a lawyer". We became good buds in the break - after I made him retract what he said.

The MC referred to the idea of building "something of value" later in the morning, so I got a sense that the core message had probably at least partly stuck.

However, the proof will be in the pudding. I expect to get feedback from the organisers on whether my talk hit the spot or not...soon.

And how about the students' talks?

I heard only the first five talks, as I had to leave after the tea break. Those five presentations gave me a good sense of the high calibre of students in this group.

Here's an idea of the room they were presenting to - my guesstimate was about 30 people in total, including the cohort on the left who are hidden by the wall (call it a "gotta go quick pic").

For people just learning to present, this could be intimidating enough.

Since I knew close to nothing about any of the first five topics, I was probably a good litmus test for their communications capabilities. I was pleasantly surprised that I learned far more than I expected, with three of the five clearly outlining the context for their research, the need, the problem it was addressing, how they went about it and the results they'd found so far. They managed to communicate well the relevance of their research.

How well did they present?

Several were able to talk "beyond" their PowerPoint presentations, and not just read what was on the slides - not easy, as those of you who present will know. A couple had some challenges; one seemed either really nervous about the whole exercise and left out the purpose of his research, and another left the audience far enough behind that by the time he got to the end of his talk, a number of us had forgotten the main application of the research (and not just me - that came out in the question period). I still learned some amazing new stuff from that fellow's talk though, even if I couldn't follow all of it. The freakazoid editor in me was pleasantly surprised by the low number of typos, unexplained acronyms and weird resizing of images.

Each managed in under 20 minutes to summarise a truly complex activity in a way that a diverse, albeit technical, audience could relate to. Kudos to the SAIMechE for putting on this conference every year!

Did I get something out of it?

Besides learning about subjects I didn't know existed, I got the opportunity to reconnect with the young lady I'd met at a previous conference. I met interesting new people and learned about a company doing work I didn't know was being done in South Africa. I learned that a terrific competition I was part of when I was in university in the 1980s, the Mini-Baja competition, where university teams design an amphibious vehicle using a lawn mower engine as the power plant - then race it on a rather vicious course, is still going strong and that South African teams battle it out every year in Pretoria (note to self - find out when and where, cause that is one fun event).

I wasn't expecting a thank you gift, but they gave me a nice bottle of red wine and (I found out when I got home), this really cool SAIMechE branded Leatherman-type multi-tool.

What a great keepsake and practical gift!

I don't know if my talk had the desired impact, or whether I'll ever find out. But I hope some of the seeds sown today find fertile ground.

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