Communicating, Writing and Presenting in Engineering – free-write

I apologize for continually coming back to the reference of my internship over the summer at Packer Engineering, but then again I don’t because it was such a good experience that helped me understand what engineering is all about. Over the summer at the company, I not only got the opportunity to do hands on work, but I also got the “opportunity” to communicate, write, and present. I’m kidding with the quotation marks of course because it really was a good opportunity, but I don’t like that kind of stuff normally. What I really found from this experience is a general concept that seems to apply to most areas of life. If I totally applied myself to the project and got excited about what I was doing even if it wasn’t actually overly exciting, then not only would the writing and presenting be more fun but the resulting product would also be better.
One example of this happening in the Packer Engineering internship was a PowerPoint presentation I had to do on a disaster in history. I picked to do research on the DC-10 plane crashes and I went into the project knowing almost nothing about planes let alone those specific plane crashes. I decided to attack the presentation from all angles. Not only would I make a good presentation, but I would find out everything I could about everything to do with airplanes. This research really created positive energy for me and the people around me. People around me started seeing how into my project I was and they told me they were excited to hear my presentation. Additionally, I got to speak with the head of the company, Dr. Packer, because Packer Engineering had been involved in investigating the crashes themselves. He described in extremely high detail the sequence of events that ended in disaster. After taking pages of notes from the conversation, I made sure I understood everything he said down to the nitty gritty. On a side note and just to get this in here (this is a free-write after all I can say whatever I want), the high school interns got to take a field trip to an airfield and I got to actually fly a plane (and I got paid to do this because it was “work” so ha!) After all my research on planes, flying one really reinforced my knowledge base. Usually, I have a slightly monotone voice while giving presentations, but this time, I didn’t even have to focus on having an interesting voice because I was naturally excited about my topic.
It was one of my best presentations ever and in my opinion it sums up what it means to give a presentation in engineering. Even if the subject may not be all that interesting to many people, if you get involved in your work, enjoy it, and learn everything you can about a subject, your presentation will have a much larger effect on people.