The short timeframe made it very difficult to present anything worthwhile in terms of content volume — stuff had to be extremely condensed at the expense of depth of ideas presented. The MURC timing didn’t help at all, but it’s very hard to get around it unless the term projects are assigned BEFORE the winter break! As with the rest of the course, it seems that to balance the problems from other classes toward the end of the term, much more work must be done in the beginning rather than end, leaving the rest of the term to polish off the paper. Hopefully MURC did help some of us with confidence in public speaking — my scarriest moment ever was at a professional conference, with my boss watching, but afterwards everything else seemed like a piece of cake, from 80min tutorial presentations to MURC (I was scared in my first one too!) and even just talking to faculty. Seems like public speaking requires some fear to be overcome one way or another… and like anything else, giving talks is an art that must be practised over and over again, with mistakes and the occasional embarassment, to improve.
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