Oral Presentations (II)

As I said in my last post, preparation and practice are essential when doing an oral presentation. So in our last class (on Thursday) we did an oral presentation, which actually is some kind of preparation for the "important" presentation we will have to do on Monday (which is tomorrow).

Tomorrow, we will have to present what ideas we are thinking of for our project about the aircraft for the year 2040. So the "pre-presentation" we had on Thursday was really valuable, because it was a good moment to practice and realize what things we are doing wrong in order to improve our presentation skills and do a great presentation tomorrow.

Not much more too say for today actually. Thanks for reading my blog!

Oral Presentations (I)

Well, today we have discussed about something I believe is the most valuable part of the subject: oral presentations. I believe in the importance of this issue because, actually, I'm not quite good at it and I realize a good oral presentation of any project can lead to many doors being opened.

My biggest problem when doing an oral presentation is re-explaining things. What I mean with this is that I usually try to explain myself as best as possible (I'm too perfectionist), but because of this I try to find the best words to explain it and I use to get them mixed up, and I think I end up confusing people instead of leaving the ideas clear. So what I must do is just let my words flow (which is quite difficult for me; but everything is possible through practice) and not re-explain things, because probably if I say something wrong, people won't take notice about it, but if I go back and explain it again, they will surely realize that what I said was wrong, and that doesn't give a good impression. 

In my opinion, the trick when you want to do a good oral presentation is just to prepare it and practice it a lot, and when I say "a lot", I mean A LOT! No good presentation is totally improvised, and if it is, the person who does it is actually a genius. 

Here I leave you a video which I think is very interesting about how to do great presentations:

That's all for today. Thanks for reading my blog.

Inform yourself before criticizing!

In today's class, my blog was shown to all my classmates and some of them gave their opinions about what they thought about this blog. Many of them were constructive suggestions (that the background is a bit dark, some posts are too long...), but there was one opinion which actually made me a bit mad (although I kept my anger to myself): they said that my blog is too descriptive and that it should be more reflective. 

The opinion by itself shouldn't have affected me so much, because it's just an opinion and I don't care, but what really drives me crazy is the fact of criticizing my blog without even having read my posts... Because if they have done so, they probably would have realized (or at least I hope so) that I don't describe what we have done in class in any of my blog entries and, in fact, I spend a lot of time thinking what to write on my blog in order to make it reflective but also interesting and valuable to other people (I don't know if I do so, but at least I try), because to say what I think without going any further I could just buy a diary and write my thoughts there.

In particular, what was mainly criticized was my last post, where I explained some of the fields of an e-mail. It's true that that's what we were told to do in class (although in class we had to explain many more other fields), but I tried to write it in a way which showed the importance of this issue. I only wanted to share this information because I consider it is really important, but not because it is what we have done in class, in fact, I didn't even mention that we have done that in class. 

To sum up, I just want to leave clear that, before criticizing something, we should get well informed about it, because if not we will probably get it wrong.

E-mails

Hi again! This time I'd like to talk about e-mails, because nowadays e-mails are so common that nearly everybody uses them, but usually not many people know how to use them in a right or effective way. So I'm going to talk about 2 main important things we should know when writing and sending e-mails.

First of all, we should know the difference between the "To:", "CC:" and "BCC:" fields, because probably many of you only use the "To:" field (before knowing the difference I actually did this too), just because you don't know what the other two are, and in fact I have realized this is a really, really, really important issue. So let's see the difference:

• "To:" should be used when you want someone to see an e-mail and you want or expect a reply. To do so, write the e-mail addresses (and/or optionally names) of the message's recipients. I guess all of you already knew this but I wanted to explain it here in order to see the difference between the following two other fields.
• "CC:" stands for "Carbon Copy" and the e-mail addresses listed in this field will receive a copy of the e-mail that is sent to the people listed on the "To:" field. This is used when you want someone to see an e-mail, but don't expect a reply. It's just to inform the people on the "CC:" about the message you have sent to the people on the "To:".
• "BCC:" stands for "Blind Carbon Copy" and is used for protecting people's privacy, so it is really important. With BCC, the identity of the people receiving the e-mail is hidden; no address entered in this field will be visible to any other person receiving the e-mail. So if you want to send an e-mail to many contacts, use "BCC:" instead of "To:", because your recipients probably won't like your other contacts to know his/her e-mail address.  

Another really important issue is the subject, which we sometimes forget about. The subject should be a brief summary of the topic of the message and it should include the most important facts or ideas you want to communicate in your e-mail. 

It is a really important field to complete because it may be the only thing the other person will read or it may be decisive to make the other person open your e-mail or not, because if you receive thousands of e-mails per day, obviously you won't read them all that day, so you will choose which ones to read depending on the subject. For example, if you see a subject which says "Information about next Monday's meeting" you may open it, but if it says "Photos from our last summer", you will surely leave it for another day.

Related to this last thing is the fact that if you want to talk about several different issues/topics, don't write one only e-mail, write one for each subject so that the recipient knows what each e-mail is exactly about.

I hope you found this post interesting and that you have learned something new!

The secretary: problem or solution?

Yesterday was my turn to be the secretary in class and it was really hard for me to act as if I were the teacher due to my shyness. It is really difficult to think when there are so many eyes looking at you, waiting for you to say something, and many times I got my words mixed just because I couldn't think clearly in my head. Actually I was a bit quite nervous.

When it comes to talking in public, if it's a planned conference, where you maybe explain some slides which you have been working during a long time and you know exactly what to say and how to say it, because you have prepared it for many days, I've got no problem; but if I have to be the one who manages the class, telling people what to do or not to do, and things like that, it's really difficult for me to do it well. Maybe I should have prepared what I would have to do as the secretary, just as if I was explaining any other sort of thing, and that way I would maybe have done it better as I think I did, because spontaneity is something I am really short of. But even if I had decided to do that, I wouldn't have had enough time, because I was chosen just the day before...

But, despite all of this, I think it is a great and really valuable experience, which helps me get rid of that stupid shyness that keeps me from doing many things. And once you do something like this, you realize what you are doing wrong in order to change it.

HEY! Listen to me, please!

Well, hi again everybody! In today’s class we didn’t actually do much but there is a topic we discussed about which I think is quite important: drawing people’s attention when speaking in public. So how can we make sure that people are listening to us?

You could talk about a topic which really attracts attention, but anyway, if you speak during a long, long, long time, although it may be an interesting topic, the public will surely end up tired of listening and will get distracted with whatever happens in the room. So in order to draw the public’s attention there are some things you can do. The most effective one is to make an interactive conference, where you involve your public in the topic you are talking about. You can ask questions, give “live” examples using the people in the room or whatever other thing you may think of which can lead to a more enjoyable conference, just let your creativity flow. The best way would be to interact with those people who you think aren’t paying attention, because this way you force them to listen to you.

Body language is also really important. If you can move around the room you should do so, because maybe your words aren’t drawing someone’s attention, but if you move, he/she will end up looking at you just because, in some way, you are “disturbing” him while moving around. And this way you make people listen more actively, due to the fact that they have to follow you with their eyes.

It’s also important to look into your public’s eyes instead of looking to a paper (please, if you can, try to avoid reading things) or to the infinite. If you do so, the people you are looking at will feel as if you are only talking to them, involving them more in the situation. 

To sum up, if you want to hold a good conference and to make people listen to you, you should make it as interactive and dynamic as possible, and you must feel the connection with your public.

Thanks for reading my blog! I hope you find my posts rather interesting or valuable.

Manuel Campo Vidal: A Great Conference!

As I said a few minutes ago in my last post, I forgot to tell you about how this Monday's conference about flexibility went (see my post: "Flexibility and adaptability").

Last Monday (15th April) Manuel Campo Vidal held a conference at the UEM about the importance of flexibility. He spoke in a way which was really easy to follow, making the topic very interesting, drawing our attention at every moment and giving a great example of the communication skills we should all have.

In addition, he talked about important topics we will need to embrace in order to achieve a better professional future. Between the most important ideas that were said in this conference I would highlight the following:

You need to be able to adapt to the society's needs and you shouldn't be afraid of moving away from your hometown, in fact you should move nationally and internationally and have a global vision of the world. Flexibility is one of the most important things you must have if you want to succeed.

In addition, knowing how to communicate well with others is essential, because the people who succeed (unfortunately) aren't those who do the best work, but the ones who actually know how to explain well their work and how to make it attractive. He also told us that we should get rid of the idea that an engineer doesn't know how to explain himself because it's totally false. In fact, Manuel Campo Vidal studied engineering and he showed in this conference that his communication skills are absolutely great.

Another important idea to take into account is the importance of having different visions from different disciplines because that's what the society asks us to have. We are engineers (in my classmates' and my case) but we also need to know a bit about other fields, such as economics or environmental science for example. Teamwork and entrepreneurship are also really important aspects we should assume.

According to the communication skills part, he gave us some tips, such as getting to know the people you are going to talk to before holding a conference or a similar situation, or saying the most important ideas at the beginning and at the end of a talk (because people usually tend to forget the middle parts). He also showed us a really interesting video which displays an example of how an effective conference should be done. The video shows the different communication tools that Al Gore uses in a conference he held about climate change. It was really interesting.

Forgotten post about Pedro Duque's interview...

Hi everybody! I'm sorry but I told you I was going to assist to an informal meeting with Pedro Duque and to a conference with Manuel Campo Vidal and I forgot to tell you about how they both went!! So in this post I'm going to talk about the Pedro Duque's one.

As you may have thought if you have read my "An Honoris Causa isn't enough" post, I was quite excited about having the chance to be in the same room as such an important person, who's been both aeronautical engineer (what I'd like to be in the future) and astronaut. But maybe I had too big expectations and that is why I'm a bit disappointed about how the meeting went... The main reason of this was that the meeting was too short (actually it didn't even reach 1 hour), in addition to the fact that it started about 20 min late.Therefore, we couldn't ask him many questions, and some of them weren't actually really important (in my opinion), compared to others we had thought of before the meeting. By the way, sometimes it was difficult for him to explain what he wanted to say, but this could have been because of two main factors:

•  first, maybe he was trying to explain it in the best way so that we could understand it
•  and second, because maybe we made a question whose answer we didn't expect and was really touchy for him (we asked something about his father and unfortunately we discovered that he isn't here any more, I don't know if you understand what I mean...I'm so sorry for that...)

Besides this, what I did like was the proximity that Pedro Duque had when he talked to us.

After this informal meeting, the "Honoris Causa" ceremony took place, but I didn't assist to it...

FreeMind

Well, this time I’d like to talk about a program that we had to use today and that I had never heard of before: “FreeMind”. 

It’s a really interesting program which creates mind maps or schemes in a really organized way. You can divide each point in several ones in an easy way and you can hide those points you don’t want to read at the moment and you can open them later (when you need to do so); so this way you don’t see a HUGE scheme with many different points which are also divided in many others, which may be also divided in many others, and so on... By the way you can open only the points or ideas you are interested in and you can hide them once you have read them, making it easier to read. 

In fact, I think it is quite useful and I may continue using it in the future. The only problem is that (obviously) you need to have the program installed in order to open a FreeMind file on your computer. Fortunately it’s free to download! But not everybody knows about it.

By the way, it is always interesting to know about new programs different from the typical Microsoft Office, which doesn’t mean that this last one isn’t good (because actually it’s really good); it’s just that they are different ways of doing things.  

Flexibility and adaptability

Hi again! In our last class (that was on Thursday 11) we were told that on Monday, which in fact is tomorrow, there will be a conference and we must assist. At first, since it will be during our “Aerospace Technology” class (which I really like), I wasn’t quite excited with the idea of having to go there, but then we were also told that we will make up for that class another day (we will have Aerospace Engineering instead of Communication Skills) so now I don’t care having to go to that conference.

The conference will be held by Manuel Campo Vidal, who first studied Industrial Engineering but ended up working as a journalist; so the conference will talk about the importance of flexibility, about the importance of adapting ourselves to the society’s needs, which in my opinion doesn’t mean to do something you don’t want to just because our society needs that. I think it’s more about having a wide variety of different possibilities we do like, although they don’t have much to do one with each other, like journalism and engineering.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading my blog!