My First Experience...

Everybody have their first experience in doing their presentations. Same goes to me. Gushing of blood, fast-pounding heart, shaking hands, slurred words and nervousness are the usual attacks on us.

Talking about my first experience, it was quite an embarrassing moment back then. As I had earlier prepared for the presentation titled “Sushi” 3 days ago, I still could not memorize and stuff all the contents into my brain. So what I did was I jotted down most of the important points into cue cards. This could help me when I forgot what to say later on and it was accepted by the lecturer. The night prior to the presentation, I was injecting as much as possible the contents into my brain and helplessly trying to remember every single word beautifully structured into sentences but to no avail. So I gave up and went to sleep. Deep down inside me, I began to feel nervous and trembling in fear of embarrassing myself in front of my friends.

As usual, I woke up late and started to rush to wash myself up and prepared to go for my lecture class which is the class we need to do our presentation. Inside the lecture hall, seeing everybody were busy practicing their speech with each other, my hands started to tremble visibly. I tried to drink some water to calm myself down and it did manage to calm me for a short time. Then the lecturer came in and started the presentation. I was lucky. I was the sixth person to present and this gave me ample of time to prepare myself for the final time.

The turn started a few minutes ago and it was not long before until it reached the fourth presenter. They were good. I began to feel nervous and worried about my performance later. My brain was not functioning well anymore. It was then my turn. I got up from my seat, adjusting myself first before going to the front to make my presentation. Only God knows how I felt that time. My hands are shaking tremendously now and everybody were cheering for me. I was not comforted but instead felt even worse. My heart was beating very fast that it could explode any minute from now when I made my introduction.

Then, I tried to pinch my legs so that I felt pain more than I could feel my nervousness. It worked. And after that, all were smooth talking right until the last point which I could not remember clearly. All of sudden, I began to slur my words out from my mouth and I did not know what I was talking about. My friends started to grin sheepishly at me and what I did next was I jumped up and down trying to remember my points before realizing that I was holding the cue cards which were supposedly to help me. I was shocked and embarrassed at the same time.
The whole class had already burst into laughing so I hastily finished my presentation and with giving thanks, went back to my seat.

I silenced myself for a few minutes to calm down before resuming my old self so that I did not look too nervous. That was my first experience doing a presentation in my university. Hopefully situation like this would not happen again.