How to Be a Presentation God

To say I’m a people-person would be an understatement. I love talking to people. It my opinion, it can be one of the easiest things to do. Which is why presenting shouldn’t be difficult for me. I did speech and debate for almost all of high school, so I know how to speak in front of people, but for some reason there’s something about giving presentations that is very difficult for me. I think it comes from a difference between a conversation and a presentation. When I’m giving a speech for debate I’m constantly thinking about what I’m saying because there’s not enough time to just form a conversation ahead of time. But with presentations, there’s this idea that you have to memorize everything you say, which in my opinion puts me in an odd state where I don’t think about what I’m saying because I’ve already memorized what I am saying. Additionally, when giving a presentation I get very winded. My speaking pattern changes and I feel like I need to breath all the time. So in order to make my presentation the best presentation that I can give, I have step up some goals.

My friends call me Scott Schwertly

1. Put Together a Script That’s Not a Real Script  

So part of the problem is that once I go up to give my presentation I feel like I lose control over what I’m saying because I just get frozen and talked based on muscle memory. So I created a list of things that I need to discuss on each slide, but rather than writing how I will transition and the actual words that I need to say, I will just practice. Every practice presentation that I do will be different because of this, but I think since I will be practicing so much it will allow me to take different avenues and try out new things, rather than getting stuck on a single phrase when there is a much better way to say something. I hope because of that when I go up to give my presentation I will feel very focused on what I’m saying rather than just sort of speaking.

2. Breathing Exercises

This one is more for the speaking aspect. In order to speak in a clear voice and not feel winded, I will do breathing exercises before. I was inspired by a Ted Talk that was called something like, How to make people listen to you. And the guy who was leading the talk discussed how doing breathing exercises can help with your speaking and your breathing. I have also found that drinking water while presenting allows me to get a bearing on where I am, and kind of restart my breathing patterns. I also interact with hundreds of people a day, so I think that I might try give them little pieces of my presentation to get comfortable with what I’m saying and lift the pressure of a presentation off. I also want to make my presentation more casual. I know that there are obvious standards and there needs to remain a level of professionalism, but I want to be able to go up there and enjoy my presentation and have a good time, not just explain what I’ve done for the last year. That’s tricky though. Hopefully I will be able to accomplish it though.

Well that’s all for my tips. I’ll tell you next week, once I have begun practicing my presentation how it is going. Until next week!

Word count: 588

I submitted my final paper!

This week, I finally submitted my paper!

Skip to 52 seconds to see my reaction. 

I apologize for the foul language around 14 seconds. But his reaction at 52 seconds is worth it. 

Oh my god! What a relief! How awesome of an accomplishment too! I have essentially submitted an undergraduate research paper, as a high school senior. My final paper was 3980 words, so around thirteen pages and then at least thirty pieces of work were cited. Although now that I think about it… I realize I made a dumb mistake. Even though my research was centered around analyzing seven pieces of literature, I never cited them in my works cited (If Mrs. Haag is reading this and hasn’t graded my paper yet, I’m totally kidding. I would never do something so silly. Take my word for it). Alright well this past week’s work was pretty challenging to be honest. I focused on three parts of my paper that needed the most changes: the abstract, the results, and the discussion.

Abstracts are surprisingly difficult to write. The reason that it’s so difficult, is the same reason that the presentation portion is ending up being more difficult: it’s hard to condense months of research into 100-250 words. Largely, there’s a portion of me who is still clinging to part of my original research ideas. When I started, my research was all over the place. I knew I wanted to do something with synesthesia, but I couldn’t figure what I wanted to do, so I learned so much about synesthesia. I learned about how the brain’s of synesthetes vary from non-synesthetes’ brains. I learned about how grapheme-color synesthesia isn’t exclusive to graphemes like letters and numbers, but also shapes. I learned about the genetic components of synesthesia. I questioned, and still do!, why identical twins are sometimes born with different synesthesia, or only one twin has synesthesia (if I could research anything with all the resources, and all the time, and all the money, I would try to figure out why sometimes only one twin will have synesthesia). I obviously learned a lot. A lot of material didn’t make it into my paper, but it still resides in my brain. So condensing all I know about synesthesia, Russian and American literature, and the industrial revolution is very challenging.

The results. This was the easiest part of the paper to edit. The results themselves did not change, but I tried to include more visually pleasing ways to view the results and more comprehensive ways to understand the results. Based on the review of my peers, the changes were nice and I achieved my goal.

Lastly was the results section. The results section was the hardest. I was happy with the limitations section and future implications, but I was lacking in the actual analysis of my results, quite possibly the most important portion of the results section. After reorganizing my results section, my findings became much clearer though. Unfortunately, my conclusion was that the books I chose to read were too different in subject matter to be able to attribute any differences in the portrayal of synesthesia to the culture. Hopefully though, someone in the future will find literature of similar subject matter and redo my research. Maybe I’ll even be able to do it! Well until next time!

Word count: 536

The Amazing Race

Currently, I lay unable to sleep. This post was definitely supposed to be posted before midnight, but in a frenzy to get to bed before 10 pm for a 6 am shift, I forgot to upload a blog post. Upon realizing my mistake, I set an alarm for 4:30 am so that I would have time to shower, eat, get ready, and write a blog post. But as I lay awake in bed for two hours, I decided that I would be too tired to write in the morning and I may as well be useful in this cursed insomnia stage. I will definitely be getting less than 5 hours of sleep tonight, but luckily I work at a coffee place. If anyone wants to make my day, I will be working 6 am-11 am at Dutch Bros on Bell and 62nd! I can give great drink recommendations and high fives!

As far as my research is concerned there are a couple things I want to cover. I have been watching a lot of The Amazing Race, so I am 100% going to be formating my blog post like an episode of The Amazing Race.

Our starting line is the results section. Once teams have completed their results section they will be receiving their next clue.

Detour Info: Teams will be completing their first detour where they will have to analyze their results and how they play into the academic conversation.

For my analysis I have found that there is a strong correlation between the usage of nature and synesthesia, and a weak one between industry and synesthesia. This is important because in a raising industrial world, based on my results, there should be a lack of synesthesia present in literature. The problem with a world where synesthesia is not represented in literature is that even though 2-4% of the population has synesthesia, it is poorly portrayed. If synesthesia is truly eliminated by more industrialization, then we can expect nobody to understand synesthesia whether they have it or not.

The reality of the situation is much more complex. According to Pat Duffy’s research, there is a massive amount of literature with synesthesia, most of it modern. That means that there had to have been a shift. For all of Ms. Duffy’s pieces of literature, synesthesia was used as a characteristic rather than as a literary device. In all the pieces of work I observed, synesthesia was used as a literary device rather than as a characteristic. Meaning that at some point there had to have been a shift.

Roadblock Info: Teams will have to explain the limitations of their research and future research.

One limitation is that although the industrial revolution’s impacts were long lasting, my research only observed the direct consequences. Of course this is extremely helpful in understanding how synesthesia was portrayed at the time, but there is little use in my research in hypothesizing how the shift between synesthesia as a literary device and synesthesia as characteristic occurred.

Other limitations were that the pieces of works chosen had research done on them that explicitly stated that there was synesthesia in the literature. The reason that the pieces of works were chosen this way, was that the literature absolutely had to include synesthesia, and there was not enough time to read hundreds of pieces of literature in Russian and English to discover if synesthesia existed in each book. That being said, there may be many more books that are more popular and have more obvious examples of synesthesia that were not included in this study.

There may have been a bias because in what was considered natural and industrial language and synesthesia. I had to decide whether or not something was considered natural or industrial according to a code I developed. In order to minimize the effect of bias, I had a consultant to identify synesthesia. but none was used to reconfirm natural and industrial language.  

Luckily, our team came in 3rd. So tune in next week to root for #teamsynesthete in a chance to win $1 million!