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Presentations in Britain
Apart from my GCSE English oral in which I spoke for five minutes on UFOs, without slides, I didn't have to give a presentation until it was actually warranted in my full-time work in Ohio after graduation. Indeed, it was less than a year ago that I finally had to use PowerPoint: previously I had used LaTeX's Beamer class. (Currently for things like workshops for users I use reveal.js.) In applying for jobs in Boston I didn't have to give any presentations: I largely took written and oral tests and people bought me lunches. Benjamin made it partway through middle school there without having had to give a presentation.
However, presentations seem ubiquitous in Britain. I had to give one as part of the interview process for most jobs I applied for; for my present job, they forgot to tell me to, and I hadn't even brought a laptop computer; they mentioned the night before that they expected a presentation in the morning, but that seemed to go okay: they got an extemporaneous talk on the selection of spare parts to include when the US Air Force deploys a set of aircraft to a different base. Another British employer got one on multi-sensor fusion for reconstructing situations in 3D: fortunately I had written code to output the actual data structures as PostScript so the sensor views and projections of the target situation were easily translated into PDF diagrams for the slides. I think it's mostly just about that one can speak intelligently and coherently.
It's not just British employers: recently Miranda has been working on yet another set of slides, even in primary school, this time on her achievements outside school. Her previous one was on salmon's contribution to Scotland's economy. Since moving to Scotland both our children have had to prepare many PowerPoint presentations. I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with employers apparently now expecting such. Why and when this love of PowerPoint occurred here I've little idea but it has been an unexpected facet of our return to this country.
However, presentations seem ubiquitous in Britain. I had to give one as part of the interview process for most jobs I applied for; for my present job, they forgot to tell me to, and I hadn't even brought a laptop computer; they mentioned the night before that they expected a presentation in the morning, but that seemed to go okay: they got an extemporaneous talk on the selection of spare parts to include when the US Air Force deploys a set of aircraft to a different base. Another British employer got one on multi-sensor fusion for reconstructing situations in 3D: fortunately I had written code to output the actual data structures as PostScript so the sensor views and projections of the target situation were easily translated into PDF diagrams for the slides. I think it's mostly just about that one can speak intelligently and coherently.
It's not just British employers: recently Miranda has been working on yet another set of slides, even in primary school, this time on her achievements outside school. Her previous one was on salmon's contribution to Scotland's economy. Since moving to Scotland both our children have had to prepare many PowerPoint presentations. I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with employers apparently now expecting such. Why and when this love of PowerPoint occurred here I've little idea but it has been an unexpected facet of our return to this country.