presentations

08/04/10

8:48 AM

4 hour seminar… 2^nd one for two days in a row. Part of the reason for my previous lapse in posts was because we had no seminars; they are rather dull for me because I can’t understand the interesting part (the students’ presentations), although I think I understand more of the scientific Chinese than I used to. This one is particularly disappointing though because Zang just presented on her (our) research and I still only understood the first half of her presentation, while giving her my full attention. Baby steps to fluency, eh?

The professor told me yesterday at one (after the 1^st seminar) to prep a 15 minute presentation for today (!) after work (!!). I got off work at 5, had Chinese class from 6-8, and so this was somewhat difficult. Worse, I emailed Zang the presentation for her to check it over, and the resulting Gchat looked something like this:

Z: Do you send it yet?

A: Yes, here it is

Z: okay

(pause)

my God!

A: What? Is it that bad?

Z: NO.

of course no!

It’s my fault.

there are some problems I didn’t tell you

I’ll do some edits to your PPT and send you back in one hour, OK?

She sent it back and I gave the presentation though, and it wasn’t painful at all. They were very nice about it (I have only been here a month, after all). During seminar, the lab notebooks of the presenters are passed around and afterwards everyone has to criticize them. Zang is extremely tidy and fairly meticulous with her lab notebook, so nobody had much mean to say about it; however, Prof Cai caught an extremely cute and rather uncharacteristic mistake. Roughly translated, he said, “Zang puts the time she does everything on every entry, which is very good. There is a small problem though. AM is for morning and PM is for night time, not the other way.”