Presentation Success!

Well dears, apparently I panicked for nothing. The presentation was great - I even got voted as having the 'best slide' of the night. The key is pictures, not bullet points. Plus, as I am able to speak fast (yet clearly), I was able to get through the deck in a record 5 minutes!

I will let you in on a little secret - I snuck in an extra slide! So glad no one was counting.

Presentations - In Brief

I am currently working on a status update presentation for my independent study project. We've been asked to present in no more than 6 sides, and 6 minutes what we've done in the past week. This is proving to be extremely challenging as I have a lot to say - as usual!

*sigh* I guess I can keep some of these slides for the final presentation.

Statistically Speaking

Today we're viewing the results of 14 statistical studies that were undertaken throughout the course of the year. It's certainly interesting seeing the scope and variety of the projects. Categories included:

- Cigarette Sales
- Website Traffic
- Contest Entries
- Self Storage
- Construction

A lot of more superior revenue prediction models were developed. I'm beyond impressed with the teams! Particularly those that had significant results. Our project was inconclusive based on the data that we were able to collect. :(

Dear students, this is your finance professor

The second of two emails I received last week from our Finance professor Kent Womack warned us that the first 2 weeks of Q2 might kill us - in his words

"I am going to warn you now, that my course is very tough for the first two weeks (ask the 2nd years!), then life will get better. So please get a lot of rest this weekend and be ready for the initial sprint."

The first email was entitled: welcome to finance, you're up! I'll admit, I didn't recognize the sender name so I almost deleted it thinking it was from one of the clubs. Luckily, I'm obsessed with email (almost too much so) so as I was procrastinating for my exams, I was reading each and every email (some twice) in an effort to be efficient in my procrastination. The contents were ominous and nearly caused me to spit out my drink:

"You and your study group have been “randomly” chosen (not exactly!) by your new professor (me) next week to give a short 6-8 minute presentation using PowerPoint, somewhere in the middle of the first class of Finance 1 on Tuesday.

Here is the topic: Should Megan get a Rotman MBA? Your group will answer the question for “you”, the real person."

The presentation was a *surprise* for most of the class. Some people had caught wind vis-a-vis other sections, but for the most part, it was a bit of a 'what the...' moment.

While it was tricky putting a presentation together right away, it was fun to do and didn't require much research - I know myself pretty well. Plus, we are done for presentations for the rest of the quarter (awesome!) so can now concentrate fully on the homework assignments.

Other than the surprise presentation, today's class was really interesting. Finance is (so far) not as scary as I thought it would be and seems to be really applicable. I'm just sitting down now to complete tonight's homework. This week is condensed because there is a Leadership Conference on Friday so we have Finance class again tomorrow morning.

I thought we were unlucky being assigned the presentation last week during exams, another team is presenting tomorrow. While it was posted on RWorld (the Rotman portal) last week, I'm not sure whether anyone really went though it in detail considering we were all recovering from exams. One poor group has tonight's 3+ hours of homework PLUS a research presentation due tomorrow.

Now I see that the *mystery presentation* was a blessing in disguise.

Thank you dear professor.