PhD Milestone

Feeling on a high. Just survived my first conference presentation at a La Trobe conference, completing my milestone for my PhD in Creative Writing. Undertaking this PhD I want to push myself and experience everything that I can as a student. Doing this conference presentation was incredibly intimidating.

I had prepared my speech about my research about Srebrenica as a setting and the historical war landscape that was the backdrop to my novel and practiced it a few times. I thought about creating a PPT but thought this might lead to some technical difficulties that would throw me off my game and wasn’t sure what to put in the presentation.

I showed up today and spent the morning watching presentations by Cinema Studies students who created incredible presentations with visuals and beautiful colours, my heart sinking with each one. In the break I hot-footed it to the library and created a PPT, embedding quotes and photos of the books that they were from, visuals of people from Srebrenica and the city itself to immerse the viewers in this world.

As my session approached the nerves developed and I regretted signing up to present like this. I was nervous about how I would run the PPT slides with my speech and how it would gel. Finally it was my turn. I presented. The slides worked and the speech. I, of course went over time, and had to quickly end it.

Lessons learnt:

• I need to trust myself in knowing my topic and not rely on a pre-prepared line-by-line speech. Instead I need to create slides with important quotes and narrate the context in between.
• Next time I’ll insert notes in the PPT and print a handout with my slides and notes to make it easier to track.
• A woman had a clicker that she used for her presentation which was genius. Must research and find one for myself.

Here are some photos. I’m including the one where I cover my face with my speech-a sin I tell my students off for and they will find it hilarious to see me doing it.

#phd #phdlife #academia