Presentatons

While I operate on Indian Standard Time rather frequently, I don’t quite like it when other people run on IST.

Today, the entire lab had to watch a master student’s presentation. This presentation was supposed to start at 1:30. It didn’t start until 2:45. Sitting around in a room for an hour was definitely not what I planned on doing for the day, and I started to worry that things wouldn’t be over by 3:30 – the time I normally leave.

By 2:45, however, the lady who was giving the presentation finally arrived (yes, the person who was supposed to give the presentation showed up an hour late. This takes IST to a whole new level.) She set up her computer and began speaking.

My fear of not being able to leave on time was quickly assuaged – that woman spoke ridiculously quickly! She stood facing the screen, with her back to us, as she rattled off the words on her powerpoint at warp speed. Her voice was incredibly high – I think dolphins may have been able to hear her. And she sounded like she would burst into tears at minute.

I have no idea what she was talking about; between her high pitched voice and extremely heavy accent and insanely rapid speech, it took all my effort to understand even half of what she was saying. But about 5 minutes into her presentation, the lady finally paused to take a breath.

That pause was all the other students needed to start asking questions.

Why didn’t she use this method or that equation? Why did she set that parameter or this one? The assumptions of her experiment were wrong. The modeling method was inefficient. The coding language could be easier. The results could be obtained faster.

It’s no wonder the lady tried to finish as quickly as possible; this peanut gallery was ruthless.

And so, while the lady finished her presentation in about 15 minutes, the other master students and professors spent almost an hour tearing her work apart. Luckily, by 4:00, my autodriver called me, asking if I still need a ride, and I was able to escape the madness.

Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to giving my own presentation.

-June 24th