20 Time Final Post

For my 20 Time project, my partner, Leena Elzeiny, and I raised awareness on the amount and harm of plastic in the oceans through advertising, which we paid for through fundraising. I don't have the product itself but all of you, who go to Saratoga High School at least, can check our final product on page 3 of The Saratoga Falcon newspaper on the May 27, 2016, issue. We basically brought half a page, through fundraising, of a page on the May 27th issue; Then we designed and made an advertisement, that raises awareness on the harm of plastic in oceans, that we placed on that space we brought.

I think Leena's and my TED talk actually went very well, a lot better then I thought it would go. Pretty much everything went well, going by plan as to what we would say and when we would say it. I can't really think of any thing we could've done better, our timing was off but it was only a bit off so I'm not too hungover that. There were also times where Leena and I stuttered but it really only happened once to both of us throughout the presentation and I think that's really impressive; I expected us to stutter more and make more mistakes than we actually did. Watching the video, I think I would grade myself as Mr.Orre, my biology teacher, did, a 96, points off for the timing and also for how our third fact wasn't really clearly said. The experience of preparing for this talk was a stressful one; The day before, Leena and I met up for more than 6 hours, practicing and preparing at both the library and Starbucks, trying to perfect our presentation. We should've probably started preparing earlier but it was all so quick and we had to bend around our own personal schedules. The experience of giving the actual talk, though, wasn't as bad; It wasn't as stressful as I thought it was going to be and I was planning on just going by the script word by word, but during the moment I actually felt confident enough to just improvise and talk as if I was just in a normal conversation, talk more like myself and less formally basically. From this, what I have taken away is that practice is key to giving a good presentation and that feeling confident in yourself when doing a talk in front of everyone is so so important and is one of the best realization and feelings you could experience.