Presenting Your Culminating Project

By ©Michelle Simms, personal development coach

When you are faced with presenting a large, daunting project, what do you do? Whether you are faced with presenting your senior project or any other type of project, there can be so many things to do that it is too overwhelming to start. Think about hanging out with your friend and talking with them about your project…because that is how easy and natural it should be.

Although it is important to be natural and at ease, it’s equally important to do so in an organized and logical manner. Below, we’ll discuss the three major components of presenting your culminating project: strategy, tactics and having fun.

Develop your strategy. Very simply, a strategy is a plan of action – a specific outline of the steps you need to take in order to succeed. Unlike a tactic, it is not a small piece of the puzzle based in specific actions, it is the overarching view of what you need to do to accomplish your goals. For example, if you have the mission of doing well in geometry this year, your strategy might be to study every night, spend one-on-one tutoring time with your teacher, and to form a study group that meets before tests and quizzes.

Develop your tactics. While a strategy is a plan to get to that goal, tactics are the small, active steps you take that compliment your strategy. You will probably have a number of tactics to implement on your way to accomplishing your project, goal or mission. A combination of different tactics is the best way to tackle your goal.

In the geometry class example, your tactics may include studying every night right after dinner, scheduling meetings after school to talk to ask your teacher questions, and ask the students sitting around you in class if they’d like to join your study group. Tactics are not as set in stone – tactics can be dropped, altered, or added as their helpfulness is discovered.

Develop your fun. Think about ways to incorporate your personality into your presentation. Do you like to sing, dance, use technology, create or invent things, tell a story, joke or talk? We all have a preferred way of taking in information. If you can appeal to different senses you will engage the audience and have fun doing it. I promise you somewhere along the process of your project there is a creative process that people want to hear about. Today’s technology, like office 2007, is so advanced in what it offers (the ultimate steal for students) and user friendly that tuning your presentation into a slide show would be more engaging that a plain PowerPoint presentation.

Developing strategies and tactics, in an engaging manner isn’t just helpful for you when faced with high school projects and challenges. Learning how to form strong strategies and tactics for success will help you throughout your life, in all aspects of your life. You might find in your future that presenting a new product idea at your business has similar steps to presenting your culminating project. No matter what your goal, the foundation of developing strategy and tactics in an engaging way can help you tackle any task, no matter how daunting.

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