I’ve been wanting to venture into public speaking for some time now and recently thanks to Science Oxford Live’s PechaKucha night I was giving an opportunity to break my public speaking cherry as it were.

PechaKucha

PechaKucha is a presentation style devised in Japan. Based on a simple concept of 20 images, 20 seconds for each. It keeps the presentation going quickly, very quickly as I found out. You can go to pecha-kucha.org for more details and to see some examples.

This was the second PechaKucha night Science Oxford had put on and seeing @iblamefish speak at the last one I thought I’d give it a try as a bit of an entry-point into public speaking. The call for talks was quite generic and a relation to science would be a bonus, so I went for something I’m pretty passionate about and got lucky as the link to science is rather strong. I’ve been interested in Formula One for as long as I can remember and as the sport is constantly pushing the boundaries of science to go as quick as possible I thought it was a good choice.

So with topic decided I needed to do a little bit more research and try and get together a presentation on the science bits behind the fastest sport on 4 wheels! So with a couple of months to prepare I did what would make the past student part of me proud, I put it off until the week before the night itself.

The night

The night of the talk I think I’d ran through it maybe once completely after overrunning on the first 3 slides about 5 times, turns out that 20 seconds really isn’t that long after all. I planned about 3-4 sentences per photo and it seemed I could barely get through 2 :/ so basically what that taught me is that I should really plan a talk a little further in advance to give myself a little longer to test it out, rookie mistake.

After finally getting over to Science Oxford and getting the slides loaded up on the computer I waited around with the hosts and a couple of other speakers for things to begin. When we got settled down for the talks to begin I actually had no idea in which order the talks were going in apart from a cursory glance at a list which had me in 4th, turns out I was second!

The talk went, well, quickly…it seemed that no longer had I got up there I was pretty much sitting back down again. A couple of things I did notice while I was speaking was that I mainly spoke to one person in the audience (the guy pretty much straight in front of me) and even though I had notes for each slide I managed mostly not to look at them as I just reeled off the first things I could remember for that slide as I was extremely aware of small amount of time I had.

The result

Afterwards there were a couple of questions, one being do I have any involvement with F1 and am I paid to do this sort of thing, the very short answer to that was ‘no’ unfortunately you don’t have to pay me to talk about F1 but if anybody would like to I’ll happily accept!

All in all I’m pretty happy with how things went, I could have done more prep and maybe given myself some more time to run through it some more and make adjustments but as a first go it wasn’t too bad. And the whole speaking in front of strangers wasn’t as bad as I thought and I would happily do it again. I was speaking to one of the other speakers at the end of the night who asked if I would do the presentation again for kids which would be an experience I guess but why not…