I’ll be presenting my senior seminar about autobiographical web comics and depression.
For the entire semester, my life has revolved around working on my senior seminar. All McDaniel students have to complete some sort of senior capstone project, and in the English major, students have to write a 25-30 page paper and give a 20-minute presentation about that topic.
Since last week, I’ve been working on synthesizing and summarizing information from my paper in such a way that I can squeeze some good content into my presentation. Because our papers are so long, we’re clearly not expected to talk about everything we’ve written about in the 20 minutes we have to present. In creating my own presentation, I’ve been trying to strike a balance between presenting a breadth of information while also giving a little depth. As a result, even though I’ve written about three different web comic artists in my paper, I’m only going to talk about two of them in my presentation — which is tomorrow. But using those two artists, I’m going to talk about web comics and depression from a variety of angles so people can see a lot of the many ways that we can look at comics about depression and how they create knowledge about depression.
I’m really happy with how my slides have turned out. I designed my own PowerPoint template so that I could have a visual theme for the presentation that didn’t look like one of the standard PowerPoint designs. I created my template so that it would match the Tumblr that I created over the summer to help myself collect comics that I wanted to use for my project. The people who see my presentation tomorrow won’t know that, but I have the personal satisfaction of knowing that I’ve paid a cute homage to my blog.
I’ve also worked on writing out notes to guide what I’m going to say tomorrow. Because this topic and presentation are so important to me, I don’t want to accidentally forget to say anything, so the notes I’ve written are fairly detailed. Hopefully, it won’t sound too much like I’m just reading off of a paper. A few more rounds of practice will hopefully make things sound a little more conversational.
The most fun part about getting ready for my presentation has hands down been shopping for a new outfit to present in. Because I’ve been crunched for time, I had to break up my shopping into two trips — one at home during break and one here in town today. I bought a new blazer and a new top to wear underneath because having clothes that look professional and I can feel good in will help give me a much-needed confidence boost when I present.
Even though I’m somewhat nervous about presenting at this point (I’m a lot less nervous than I was at the beginning of this week), I invited lots of my friends and professors to come see the presentation, and a lot of them are coming. It’s exciting to have so many people who are excited about my topic and who are excited to watch me succeed.
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