Sunday, September 14, 2008

My eight minutes of fame…

Although it wasn’t the most illustrious debut in history, I can now say that I have entered the international speaking circuit. :) My friend Will was laughing at me because this was only an 8 minute presentation (with an additional 4 minutes for questions) but I was ridiculously excited about the opportunity. But you see…speaking to an international audience has been a lifetime career goal of mine, and now I can check that box.

The presentation went pretty well, although I certainly could have used a bit more practice. I’m very comfortable with public speaking, but that sometimes leads to laziness on the preparation front! Samia caught a couple of minutes of video on my phone, but I haven’t had the guts to watch it yet.

The best part about the speaking panel was the opportunity to meet the other panelists. They were all such interesting and accomplished people—hailing from Japan, India, Canada, the U.S., Thailand, and Tobago! I had a great time chatting with them before and after the session, and plan to keep in touch with a couple of them. Actually, the girl who spoke right after me was a Japanese RD that I had met at ADA last year—it was fun to reconnect and feel like I had a real-life international network. :)

Oh…there was one bit of excitement/intrigue surrounding the presentation. Since I was still updating my slides until the last moment, I had to use the hotel computer to print my notes pages. The public computer cost 100 Yen for five minutes of time, which masochistically ticked away at the top of the screen as I scrambled to complete my task in the only five minutes that I had enough coins to complete. Unfortunately for me, however, all of the computer menus were in Japanese. :) Through the blessings of icons, as well as my Power Point memory ("Print what? Slides. Handouts. Notes Pages…"), I finally figured out how to get what I needed (after accidentally re-booting the computer AND viewing the contents of all other drives) with only a few seconds remaining. I knew the presentation was destined for greatness at that point…haha.

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