After a long long long wait..it was time for us to present our final year project. Yeap a long long wait and yet we have lots to finish up at the last minute..hahaha normal human nature..really if we couldn't complete something in our project because there was "not enough time", we really have only ourselves to blame...
I for one, kept procrastinating and left ALL my project documentation work until it was announced that our presentation would be in two weeks time..even then I doubted that this time it would be real because we had been waiting for quite some time and were told many times that it would be in "two weeks"
I even left all the parts in the project that my academic supervisor told me to improve on until the last week! I was so confident that the documentation would be a piece of cake and I would be able to complete it in 2-3 days tops but I WAS WRONG. The reason I was so sure of myself was because I almost always only took 1 full day in front of the computer to complete my assignments for the past 4 YEARS. But this documentation was no joke. Only when I really started doing it that I realised that I would need much more time than expected.
Besides the documentation, I had the improvements to make in my project remember? So at one point I said to myself, SCREW YOU DOCUMENTATION! Let me work on my project first.
Then there was all this misinformation/miscommunication about needing to hand in the documentation to the panel of lecturers during our presentation and then when some students presented, they didnt ask to see it..I guess I was kinda lucky that I was the LAST in the list to present. Therefore, I had the advantage of an extra 3 days to be mentally prepared for my presentation. It was kind of a blessing but it also had its downside...
My group of friends had presented on the very first day and even though they were super stressed and strapped up for time to complete, they were very relaxed after their presentation which then left me with 3 days of anticipation. I stayed up till 3.30 am the night before my friends' presentation day to provide help and went to college on that day to provide moral and technical support..lol
I kept asking everyone how their presentation was and who they got as their panel of examiners, did they ask many questions?, how long was your presentation?, were the lecturers really scary?, etc..
I heard success stories and then I heard horror stories..It really got to me the day before my presentation. I was so nervous I felt my stomach flipping around..lol The words of encouragement from friends who had done theirs really did help alot..
A dear friend of mine ended her presentation in tears because she lost the completed softcopy of her project cos she didnt have a laptop so she saved it in a pendrive and planned to use my netbook for her presentation. Right before the presentation, she had plugged her pendrive into the college's computer to print the presentation slide handouts and when she plugged it back into my netbook, virus alarms kept popping up and her files were gone. Not all her files were gone..the unimportant stuff were all still there but the stuff she needed were gone. See how fate screws you up sometimes? She thought nothing of it as she had a copy saved in another friend's laptop. So we transferred those files to my netbook and she went straight for her presentation cos she was already late as it was.
We peeped through the door and thought she was doing fine but when she came out, she was in tears. The copy she saved in my friend's laptop which she used for her presentation somehow was the incomplete version of her project. There were parts where she couldn't show and the lecturer didn't quite believe her explanation...poor thing..pity her..but then I believe that everything happens for a reason and sometimes we might not be able to figure out why something happens but in the future, one day we will know. So i hope that this mishap somehow or another will bring good things for my friend in different ways. God works in truly mysterious ways. :)
This post was just describing the experience of the days before MY presentation and hopefully I will write another post to tell you about my final year project presentation experience..
I'm kinda typing all this in the dark now cos there is a baby sleeping next to me and I don't want to switch the lights on which might wake him up cos when he wakes up he won't go back to sleep no matter how hard you try to get him to! He hates sleep! He's a fast charger! baby baby, you will know how much you love sleep when you're grown up..lol
toodles!
tata!
Ps: ALWAYS ALWAYS double, triple, quadruple a most updated copy of your important project or assignment in different storage methods.
Tip: I always email myself a copy of my assignment just in case all hardware fails me at the most crucial time then I can always download the copy from my email.
