Posted on: April 27th, 2009 by Famous Phil

So, I was thinking that I should drift a little bit to my personal life and talk a little bit about my public speaking skills which seem to be severely lacking.   Of course, this idea came to me in the shower like most of my better (or worse??) ideas do.

About 3 to 4 weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to become a Teaching Assistant (TA) for the Computer Science Department (CSE) for the entry level course that teaches students Java (The programming language distributed by SUN).  I went through the interview fine and was asked to give a 10 minute presentation/lecture on what a Constructor is at the level a CSE115 (entry level course) student.

I didn’t know too much about the constructor other than it is the part of a class that instantiates that class.  I went into that lecture knowing a lot about the constructor but I did not rehearse anything.  I also know what I expect out of public speakers as an active listener, therefore, I went in with no power point and rather wanted to just experiment in the Java compiler and explain what everything was line by line from real code.  I wrote a bunch of partial examples in Java prior to my presentation to make sure that I would be prompted to not miss anything important.  Although I doubt I missed anything important, I know that I definitely did not explain anything well.  I would have done much better just reading off a slide and a note sheet (which I hate when public speakers do).

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Tags: computer science, constructor, cse, java, lecture, lecture series, presentation, public speaking, random numbers, university at buffalo
Posted in Personal, Student Life, Uncategorized
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