Presentation at National Tox Meeting: Complete!
Wow, I swear none of the people at this know how to present. An hour was blocked off for 4 people, 10 minutes of presentation, 5 minutes of questions. A highlight of the people who went before me:
1) The first person spoke for 30 minutes. And then got 10 minutes of questions. I liked her presentation, but she spent 10 minutes talking about one slide that could have been explained in 2. She was a cute Canadian (incidentally, NEB, do you have any relatives in the Toxicology world whose last name is the same as yours?), though, so it wasn't that bad, and the presentation was neat.
2) Nervous. Nervous. Second person read directly from the slides, and had odd slide set-up - no charts or graphs, just words. She was on time, though, and probably one of the better ones :/. Again, cute, 29-year old MD, so she can be forgiven.
3) The third person...Spoke. Vietnamese. And English...Mixed together. Yeah. She also read from the slides, used no transitions, and...wow. When questions came up, someone else from the room (not even someone who worked on the presentation!) had to come up to field them since NO ONE COULD UNDERSTAND HER. Also cool, and also reinforcing my belief that the French are awesome, a French Toxicologist BLASTED her with questions that she didn't respond to or glance over in the presentation. Just awful...a lot of people left now, since she went over time (it was now 12:19...the schedule was originally 11-12).
4) Mine went amazingly well. Lots of good questions, I got to shoot a guy down who made a bad practice comment (dur, we don't follow published guidelines and are fine, dur dur), and one time, and people actually stopped and watched it. Went amazingly well, lots of comments, made some good connections (Allister Vale!!!), and overall it was awesome.
Conference has been great so far. Probably going to see the Alamo today. All paid for ^_^