Pecha Kucha Experience

I’ve never before heard of a presentation called “Pecha Kucha” until this semester, and I have to say, I enjoyed it a lot! I am usually extremely nervous when it comes to giving a presentation, especially when there is a native speaker in the audience. Because of this nervousness, I tend to speak really fast so that I swallow most of the words, or Iose track of what I prepared to say like when I had to give a presentation during the hot and stressful culture days last semester. However, this wasn’t the case this time (thank God!) and I felt really confident while delivering this special type of presentation. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had more time to prepare it properly, or that I simply got to do it with my good friend Emina, which made this experience lots of fun for both of us. I was even more surprised to find out that our classmates thought the same thing! Apart from having noticed that we stupidly confused an Irish map with a Scottish one (again, really sorry about that!), most of them thought we were very fluent, self-confident and that our PowerPoint was very good and interesting as well. What can I say other than this feedback was really the icing on the cake.

From “Making of” to “the Product”

Well, after Emina and I decided to make the Irish language our topic, we met up twice (which wasn’t that much of extra work since we practically see each other every day), made an outline to see where this presentation was going, collected all the information we could find and started writing the transcript together. While doing that, we tried to make it as interesting and creative as possible, since this was the purpose of the whole Pecha Kucha thing, so we asked Fiona to record something in Irish for us, which she kindly agreed to do. After that, we agreed on dividing up the transcript in 40 sec. sessions so that it doesn’t get too boring. The PowerPoint was also done in no time, and we were left with nothing but practicing so that we don’t go over the 20 seconds per slide. This “rehearsing evening” was definitely the fun part!

After delivering the presentation, I got to just lie back and enjoy some of the other interesting Pecha Kucha’s. All in all, I was very much satisfied with our successful presentation and wouldn’t have changed anything if I could (well, expect for the Scottic map, of course ;)).