Tip for MLIS Presentations: Don't Be 'That Student'

This evening will be the last MLIS lecture I will ever have to attend. I will be presenting my final project with my Collection Development group. With it being grad-school you would come to expect some level of common-sense when it comes to presentations. Unfortunately, this was not the case for one of last week's groups.

Last week, one group decided to choose the font CURLZ MT for their PowerPoint.  I am pretty sure the person in charge of the PowerPoint was one of the older ladies in the group, you know the second-career students.  Bless her heart, I know she might not have had the privilege of having PowerPoint around for her undergrad classes so she's really gung-ho about it now.  If it wasn't bad enough she chose Comic Sans' black sheep cousin as the only font, she also used the retina-searing color combination of white on red.  I was literally crying from their presentation.  Don't be that student that tries to have a "creative" PowerPoint by using "fun" fonts and seizure inducing animations.

That group also had the pleasure of being asked ridiculous questions by a student peer.  It was quite obvious that the group created their collection development for a made up but for some reason this girl started asking serious questions: "Is it a town or a city?" "How big is the population?" etc..  Really?  You're going to ask these stupid questions about a made up place?  Don't be that student who drags lecture on longer than usual by asking stupid questions and don't put your peers on the spot by asking hardball questions that make them look bad because they can't answer it.  

On a side note, I actually did this to one group in one of my undergrad business classes.  During our peer review session, this girl completely trashed my group's business model.  First of all, I was the only one in my group who was born in the States and spoke English as my first language.  She wasn't very constructive in her criticism and it made my group-mates feel stupid.  So I personally felt like it was my responsibility to do the same to her when her group presented.  They were presenting on Nvidia and they erroneously said that Xbox 360 used Nvidia's chipset.  C'mon now, that one won't slip by this gamer.  Funny thing is, is that 2 years later in my last business class, that girl and I ended up teaming up together and became friends.