Wednesday, May 11, 2016

The BE Communication Lab

I, like most of my classmates, only scheduled a meeting with a BE Communication Fellow because I wanted the extra credit.


In retrospect, the 20.109 professors were very smart for offering this as extra credit because it really did help my presentation.

Olivia and I met with Brittany Thomas (I know, super confusing with the names) yesterday to go over our research proposal presentation for Mod 3. The original hope was to get quick feedback on our slides and then actually present and get feedback on that. I was very confident in our slides and assumed that the first part of the meeting would go quickly. I was wrong.


We ended up going for 1.5x longer than our original scheduled meeting, and we didn't even get to the actual presenting. We started off by going through each slide and giving a general idea of what was on each slide. Brittany told us that we did a good job of using slide titles. I was honestly incredibly excited to hear any form of praise.


She then helped us reorganize the order of our slides and alter our overall title. Her method was irritating in the moment. She or I would bring up a problem and then she'd ask, well what do you think you should do? I'm sitting there thinking, I came here to get your advice lady.


But Olivia and I played along and would eventually come to a satisfactory answer somewhat by ourselves. Looking back, I really appreciate her approach. Instead of just giving us the answer, she showed us how to reason through those types of problems so we have those skills for similar problems in the future. It's like the give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish thing.

Overall, Olivia and I had a very positive experience with the BE Communications Lab. Brittany even emailed us today to follow up and see how our presentation went. In this very stressful time, it's really nice to know that someone cares.

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