Presentations

This semester should be designated as “the semester of group projects”. I have four classes. Guess how many classes have RECURRING group projects? FOUR. Yep.

You know what goes well with group projects? Presentations, presentations and more presentations.

I should thank my western education right now. Since elementary school, presentations have been a regular part of school. I was Florence Nightingale. I’ve made a ceramic mask. I dressed up for my senior profile and have used more tri-fold boards than could ever possibly be necessary. Add in science fairs, G/T nights (Gifted& Talented [because once upon a time I showed promise and potential])) and “new and interactive” teaching methods, and 15 years later, presentations are no sweat.

It also helps that we had to study PowerPoint. I remember sitting in Software Applications class (sophomore year of high school...) and hammering out presentation after pointless presentation. They really were an exercise in futility. We never actually presented them. We’d just make them to the clients’ (textbook assigned fake people) specifications and get graded on creativity and if we filled their requirements, and then we’d delete them and start on new ones the following week.

                                                       

With that in mind, I have more than a few tics and twitches when it comes to presentations, specifically PowerPoint presentations. To my classmates and professors and everyone else who does these things: it’s not personal, it’s strictly business (unless I hate you, and then it is personal.  Your inability to make a perfect presentation obviously reflects negatively on your value as a human being). 

1)  Slide colors.

Please. Please please please please pleeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaasssssssssseeeeee. I’m all for creativity and colors and whatnot, but check and the contrast and visibility. Don’t use red font on a black background.  Try not to assault the senses…I shouldn’t feel like I’m being blinded. Neon colors are NOT YOUR FRIEND.

2) Amount of text

This is a presentation, not a novel. I was taught that a slide should never have more than 100 words on it, and I think even that’s a bit much.   People should be focused on you, not racing to read everything before you switch slides.

3) Text size

Again, it’s just the way I was taught: nothing smaller than 18pt. 10~12pt is typical print 's read at arm’s length or so. Considering that, how do you expect people to read 12pt on a screen several feet away? If the audience is squinting, it’s a bad sign. If there isn’t enough room on the slide to fit everything you need, split the information up, but don’t make it microscopic.

This is infuriating for several reasons...

4) Font

If you EVER use Kid Print, Comic Sans or any other “cutesy” font in a presentation that isn’t for a group of kids, slap yourself. Do it again. And again. And again. Times New Romans, Arial and Calibri are always safe bets.  It’s better to be boring than illegible. (I had a hagwon owner who had monthly meetings. English is my first language and I could barely understand the words because of the font…)

4) Reading slides

DON’T DO IT. DON’T DO IT. JUST DON’T FRICKIN’ DO IT! I (along with the rest of your audience) am fully capable of reading. It’s called a presentation.  You are presenting the information. My Software Apps teacher put it like this: “the presentation is a body. Your slides are the skeleton.  Your speech completes the body.” She’s right, you know. The slides hold the basic information and structure the speech, but you need details and stuff to fill in the blanks, that’s where the speech comes in.

5) Animations, videos and images

The image is more of a distraction...don't do this.

Good. Wonderful. Fabtastic…in moderation.  The images or animations should add to the presentation, not just be there to be cute or take up space. Negative space isn’t always a bad thing. If you add a video, make sure it works. Images shouldn’t clash with the slide or be distracting.  Charts are in this category as well. If the chart is too large to fit on a slide “comfortably”, cut it in pieces or don’t use it.

6) The Speech

Don’t write a script. If you have a script, you’re reading a script. If you’re reading a script you’re not looking at the audience. Notes are all fine and good, I use them all the time, but being read to from a script is no good. Know the information you’re presenting and be comfortable enough with it to hold a decent conversation about it. You’ll always have that one special person who asks a ridiculous question (that they probably already know the answer to).  All you can do is answer to the best of your ability. I’m no stranger to saying “that’s not the focus of this presentation, but you’re more than welcome to look that up if you’d like” (Yeah, I’m kinda blunt like that).

 7) *Super Extra Twitchy Tic* Do not end with "thank you for listening to my speech". If you are a professional speaker, the audience should be thanking you for speaking. If you are a student, they don't have a choice, so there's no thanking involved. It's trite. It's meaningless. Stop it. It's okay to just say "that's all for my speech" or "thanks for your participation"(if they participated) but, every single speech I've heard in this country has ended with "thank you for listening [to] my speech." STOP IT RIGHT NOW!

"Thanks for listening to my..." TALK TO THE HAND, BECAUSE THE EARS DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT!

If it seems like I’m being critical, it’s because I am. Simply type “Bad PowerPoint” into your search engine of choices, and you’ll see that I’m not alone in my disdain for certain things…

One of the biggest irritations about presenting in grad school here is this: “English is your language, and you’re good at presentations, so you should present.” No. Nice try, but no. English is my language and I’m good at presentations, so  you should present. I don’t want the practice, I’ve got 15+ years of it versus your 1-2 years. Besides, as long as you’re understandable, English ability isn’t important. What’s important is the content of the presentation and your ability to get it across in a way that doesn’t create more questions than it answers….

Okay? Good. Check you in the next entry, when I’ll go over the evils of group projects.

Second Semester Schedule

Praise the Lord! I’ve got a textbook! One week from midterms and I’m just now getting my first textbook. That should tell you what kind of semester I’m having. Yeah.  As for the”back to regular updates” and whatnot. Sorry I’m not sorry...suffering from a severe case of "why should I care?"

I suppose I should fill you in on the mess that is my schedule, and a description provided by the syllabus, along with how they're going so far.

The Strategy of Development Assistance Projects

In development programs and projects, the particular combination of rationalities may materialize through a combination of factors, such as: a general political and administrative culture of the society; established policy of a donor agency; ideas of individuals involved in planning; and the constellation of actors in idea generation, plan formulation and decision –making.  The main concern of strategy formulation is improvement in the quality of life in developing countries. More specifically, strategies for achieving the development goals include addressing poverty issues and tackling factors following questions: Who decides what resources are given or lent, to which countries and under what conditions? What types of aid are effective? What are the post-emergency priorities in countries suffering from the effects of man-made or natural disasters and how can international development assistance work best in such conditions? The course will examine the specific development issues in the context of development programs. It is designed for nurturing international development consultants in the future.

In Reality: Charts, hypotheses and theories, theories hypotheses and charts. I’ve been in the class since September and am no closer to being able to answering ANY of the questions posed in the syllabus. This is more like an exercise in how to weed through page after page of repetitive BS for the three sentence explanation you actually need.

Public Private Partnership & Corporate Social Responsibility

This course covers the most salient issue in today’s development cooperation: mobilizing financial, technical, and managerial resources of the private sector in development especially with regards to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), perceived as alternatives or supplementary to the traditional modalities of development cooperation relying on traditional public resources such as foreign aid.

In Reality: How to become a slave to the Harvard Business Review. Other than that: meh, acceptable.

Project Cycle Management

This course is designed to provide the IDC students with practical knowledge of project cycle management (PCM) methods, skills and tools in the public sector that manage ODA development projects through project programming, identification, design, appraisal, implementation and evaluation, using the Project Design & Monitoring Framework (DMF) and participatory approaches. By the end of this lecture the students should understand and be able to utilize various tools of project cycle management

In Reality: I’ve killed several forests for lengthy handouts I’ll never read again (or in their entirety). Abbreviations and acronyms need to die. Other than that, it’s coming along quite well and I’m actually learning isht I can use.

Business Consulting Skills

The class of Business Consulting Skills (BCS) is designed for undergraduate students who want to develop and enhance core competencies necessary to become competitive consultants or effective managers. Instead of dealing with specific themes of business consulting, this course will deal with general topics relating to various industries of global business.

In Reality: There’s not much to it so far, as we’ve missed a few Fridays (and the class is only on Friday), but what we have done is actually useful in a concrete way and immediately applicable.

Rewind

Yeah, yeah...I've been slow to get back to regular posting.

In the few months that I haven't posted, a lot has happened. Here's a quick rundown

• Got my grades!
• Worked all over the country
• Registered for new classes
• New semester 

-Got my grades
Remember the *much* earlier post about how feedback would be nice because I had no idea if I was failing or doing well or not? Well,come grade release time, I was a mess. No, seriously. I was fully expecting a letter with the words "unsatisfactory academic progress" "academic probation" and/or "expulsion" in it. I actually covered my eye (the left one, I can barely see out of the right) and moved closer until the letters started coming into view. There were far more straight lines than I was expecting! A, A, A+, B. I got an A in my business class. This is the class where I failed the midterm exam and had a project with one of the worst team members ever (it always happens that way).  The B in econ was a godsend, for sure. I was so lost on the final that I actually drew a despairing stick figure ( OTL )and wrote a note apologizing for my poor performance on the test. The rest were...meh, grades are grades.

-Worked all over the country
Yep. Multiple cities. I was mostly in Gyeonggi-do and Jeollabuk-do, but it was still a hassle. But I did get to see some cool stuff. Like Game Science High School. It's a high school where the kids focus on different aspects of gaming (like sound, graphics, E-sports [professional gaming], and arcade machinery). Then, there was an English Village. I had already worked at one in Jeonju (my last city), but this one was much nicer (of course, administration is just like remember: a complete joke...but that's to be expected). So, I made enough money to pay my tuition and even have some left over for rent (yay rent!)

-Registered for new classes
AH hahahahaha! What a crapshow. Last semester's classes had maybe 10~20 people in a class. This semester, every class I have is full. Like "not enough chairs and desks in the room", full. The registration system in school is a bit strange to me. Foreign exchange students register first, and then new kids, and then the returning students. Back home, the newbies register last, and foreign exchange students register with regularly enrolled students. Many classes are only  offered once a year, so it makes no sense for a new kid to be enrolled (since they have more time) and a 4th(and final) semester student not to be able to register... With that in mind, I was on my computer at 8am and signed up for the classes I wanted, but then I went back and wanted to change and the rest were already full! It took a lot of walking around and emailing and bugging the office admin staff, but it's all good, now.

-New semester started
Yep, I'm into my second semester already.  I've got classes that I'm actually looking forward to taking, and my classmates are pretty okay (lol). Hard to believe that come December, I'll be halfway done...

Back

Sorry for the long hiatus (not really...it was much needed I'll fill you in later)

Back to the regular twice a week updates!

Hiatus

When things get back to normal (or somewhere near it), I'll get back to updates. For now, I have other infinitely more important things to focus on. Sorry. Swan diving into an empty pool is the closest description I can think of for everything right now...we'll see what comes next.

Job Hunting

My sad, sad Gold Star Chart. Needs work.

I want a cookie, gold star, high five and whatever else you’re willing to give. My last month has been stupid rough. I don’t want to get out of bed. I eat only because I have to, and I’ve not been to the gym for more than four hours in the last three weeks combined. So yeah, it sucks.

I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. And actually, I don’t want to sleep. It sounds crazy, because it (quite possibly) is. When I sleep, I have nightmares that make me not want to sleep again. What kind of crazy am I talking about? Well...in the past ten days, these have been my dreams: EVERY single member of my family dies (and no one told me), I’ve been a murder victim (several times in several different ways. Last night I was thrown down an escalator) and I’ve fallen off a bridge into a sea of glass. Needless to say, sleep and I are even less friendly than usual; I’m probably already in the early stages of sleep deprivation. That or nearing a heart attack.

Not being able to sleep means I can’t think, which means I can’t function and I’m all kinds of “off”. Seemingly stupid things drive me absolutely insane now. One of those things that makes me rage far more than it should is searching for a job.

Yes, yes, yes. It’s about that time. Finding a way to pay my rent is sorta kinda important. The most feasible job for me is as an “English Teacher” at an after school program or a summer camp. The money is great compared to anything else I could probably find. Most part time jobs I’ve seen offer 6,000~10,000 won (about $6~$10 an hour). That’s *no joke* less than what I made at my first job when I was 14. The thing about teaching is that you often have to have a proper teaching visa, and because I’m from the US, it is a HUGE hassle.

In order to teach, you have to have a criminal background check. That makes sense. You don’t want a child molester or serial killer coming to your school. Fair enough. A federal (national-level) check? Okay. Because some people figured out that you can commit a crime in one state, go to another and it doesn’t show up on the new record in the new state. But why...why why why do I need to get the national level (FROM THE FEDS) check apostilled? The background check is coming straight from the FBI Criminal Justice Investigative System branch in West Virginia, that’s fingerprint headquarters. It takes several weeks to get the background check done (because there’s no such thing as fast and efficient government) and THEN I have to send it off to another agency to have them certify that it’s real. That’s ridiculous and it can take up to 8 weeks. 

But my real issue is this: only foreign teachers have to do it, and then, only teachers going for E-2 (Teaching) visas. That’s discrimination, and I’m the last person who will usually complain about that. Really? There are no Korean child molesters or serial killers? Foreigners who are married to Koreans are automatically “safe” people? If you want to check backgrounds, why not do it for everyone coming into the country? Students can kill people. Industrial workers can be child molesters. No. It’s only the foreign teachers.  Same with STD and HIV testing (and that stuff ain’t cheap). Only foreign teachers have to do it. Considering the ratio of foreign teachers to all the other foreigners in the country (tourists, workers, students, spouses), I’m pretty sure that more of them are carriers of the dreaded STDs. I also happen to know more than a few Koreans who don't always wrap before they tap....But, you know, only foreigner English teachers have STDs.

Fun fact: the Korean government actually got in trouble with the UN’s Human Rights Council because some people finally brought forth that STD testing has nothing to do with teaching and is only applied to foreigners who are teaching. Moreover, so what if someone has syphilis? It’s not like they’re going to give it to their students. Easily communicable diseases like Hepatitis and Tuberculosis I can understand, but having an untrained lab technician stab me in the arm so you can see if I’ve got HIV? Pointless.

There’s another thing about job searching that really irks me here, more than any other places I’ve applied for jobs (US, Japan, Philippines, China): the lack of a response. The POLITE thing to do if someone applied for a job and you don’t want to hire them is to send them some sort of a rejection or at least an acknowledgment that you got an application from them. Here, nothing. I’ve applied to 10+ jobs and heard back from ONE.  I understand being busy and blah blah blah, but that’s just wrong. I’m tempted to add “Please respond, even if the answer is no”, because this non-responsive crap has got to stop.

Trying to keep my head up and not get discouraged, but that's much easier said than done. Enough for now. Back to scanning the internet for ads... But on an unrelated note: organ sales need to be a legal thing. $3,000 for bone marrow and $10,000 for a kidney?! Bone marrow replenishes and I only need one kidney to survive...

Drinking...

is a national pastime.

That little chart means that ONE person drinks about 6 bottles of bastard vodka A MONTH. Let's do a little math, eh? A bottle of soju is about 7 shots. The pictured beer bottle is about 5 glasses, and makgeolli is impossible to measure. With that in mind, that's about 40 shots of soju, 30 glasses of beer and a butt-ton of makgeolli.....Oh, Korea... I love you.


So yeah, people drink a lot. Now, onto the real shocker for me: who they drink with.

Teachers and Professors.
I would never DREAM of drinking with my professors. In fact, as a student, if you see them in a bar, it's quite awkward and you try to ignore them. So, imagine my complete surprise when in the middle of class, a professor suggested that we all go out for happy hour sometime and have drinks together.

WHAT?!?!?!

Yep. Go out for drinks as a class. Lawsuit waiting to happen. (Litigious USA, for the win)
I did grow up in the States, and of course I knew about keg parties and frat parties and all that craziness, but I never really did any of it. There were a few times I'd go out with a group and play with the infamous Solo cups, but it wasn't anything too spectacular or memorable. with that in mind, how would I go out for drinks with a professor? Someone I'm supposed to see in a professional capacity. Because honestly, "let's stop drinking." said no one ever.


Co-workers and higher ups.
Therein lies the mystery of mysteries:"hway-shick" (again, pronunciation, NOT spelling).
What's that? You go out with your company to eat and "play" and "be friendly". In simple terms, get drunk with your co-workers. I was really surprised. My hagwon owner and all of the teachers went to some grubby bar and the proceeded to get absolutely smashed. I would never imagine getting drunk with my co-workers back at home, let alone with my boss.  My BOSS was red faced, screaming, spilling drinks and couldn't stand up. She was that drunk.  That's what we call 'lawsuit' back home.

Not so uncommon. *And there no open container or public intoxication laws, here*

A good Korean friend of mine worked for a very high-status company. For some odd reason, they invited me to join them after work for drinks.  I got there and they were all in their company jackets, drunk as all get out. Really, the one guy was passed out on the table and the youngest one was so drunk he couldn't keep his head up, yet he had to keep going because his superiors  kept pouring him drinks. I just can't wrap my head around it.

Now, don't get me wrong, there is nothing inherently wrong with alcohol. It's just a completely different mindset, here. As for for me, it wasn't until I came to Korea that alcohol and I became good buddies. Most (if not all) of that was thanks to "teaching". Go out after work and swap horror stories  over a few beers and cheap drinks (much easier because most of us didn't finish work until after 8pm). Plus, soju tastes like cheap vodka without the burn, so it mixes well with beer. Double punch.  Add into that the cultural aspect of drinking in South Korea (you'll regularly see characters drinking and drunk on TV), and you've got a national sport going.

In the end:

It even comes in juice-box form!

God bless cheap alcohol. No, seriously. A 13 oz bottle of 40 proof  is about a dollar. As a broke student, I can appreciate the cheap isht in life.

Motivations to Help

At the risk of turning into a diary today is strictly business and full of biting cynicism.

There are a bunch of groups and organizations behind foreign aid and policy. This week I have a paper due that chronicles the why and how of different agency actions, and for once, I actually halfway understand the correlation to what we’re studying and what we’re writing about (though I still think this would have been better suited for the first paper, instead of the second-to-last)

Basically there are three motivations: Good Neighbor Policy, Economic Interests and Foreign Policy. With that in mind: the more I learn, the less faith I have in humanity as a whole. Seriously. The development groups tend to be just as self-serving as you and me.

Good neighbor is just why it sounds like: helping because it is the right thing to do, because you want to be a so-called “good neighbor”. Now, I’m sure you think that's the way everything should be done. But think about it in your personal life: do you ALWAYS help people just because it’s the right thing to do? What if they've wronged you in the past? What if they don't believe what you do or have ideas that disgust you? If the answer is "yes, I’d do it", then congratulations. You're an amazing person and if there were more people like you in the world; it’d be a much better place. However, I highly doubt that you always help whenever you can just because you should. Ever walked past a beggar? Told someone you were busy and you weren't? Yeah. That’s what I thought. So, it’s completely unreasonable to expect organizations to behave in ways we don’t, considering that the organization is made of people...

Which brings us to motivation number two: economic interests

Money. Cash. Stuff I wish I had lots more of....you get the idea.

More often than not, there is some kind of economic interest at heart. Countries help countries who can make their lives better. Think they should go for the underdog? Let’s see...

You have a choice: two people. One will eventually be rich and powerful, the other will not. If you could see the future you'd help the one who'll be rich. Why sink time and resources into something that won’t someday benefit you? (See what I mean by "faith in humanity is failing"?)

And last but not least is Foreign Policy.

I’ll help you, but you have to do XYZ. Or, I’ll help you if you do (don’t do) XYZ.  Try as they might, organizations, much like the media, pretend to be neutral, but aren’t. It all comes down to strategy. “Let me help you”...of course, by “help”, I mean “steer you toward my ideologies and cultural norms under the guise of helping you poor miserable people build better lives”. God bless the USA, I love my country, and I’ll be the first one to yell “MURICA! HELL YEAH!” while drinking beer, but we’ve got serious issues in our development past BECAUSE of how we’re often motivated by foreign policy. (Hint: Aid to Cuba wasn’t being a good neighbor; it was to keep them from going Communist, which failed anyway).

The things I found out doing research for the paper seriously irked me, hence the cynicism.

Why can’t organizations just come out and say what their motivations are, instead of pretending?

It’s just like the media, who claim to be neutral:  watch long enough and you can see the alliances and rivalries. Just say what you’re after!

Sure, it looks bad to say “I’m helping you because one day you’ll be my chief importer”, but it looks worse for someone else to come along and uncover it. Besides, being upfront would allow for more decision-making by the recipient. Howso? Check it:

Democratic Country: Your people are poor and starving, let us help you, and in exchange you have to consider becoming democratic

Communist Country: Screw you and your aid. I’ll get help from someone else.

OR

Communist Country: Ok. Done.

Result: It goes back onto the government of the Communist nation to make a decision and deal with their problems. Change and get help, or stay the same and die. Eventually the people will do something, or they’ll die off. Either way, Democratic Country can say they offered, so there’s no blood on their hands.

Of course, this is being incredibly basic. There are too many people, egos and way too much bravado involved for it to be that simple. (because that’s all politics boils down to: ego and bravado *hence you’ll never see a soft-spoken leader* )

And that’s it for today. I’m sure there are exceptions, but this was a speed-run.  Not demonizing any particular organization or group, just peeved about the illusion of neutrality.

The whole “lies and propaganda” thing is why I stepped away from journalism, even though I wanted to work in the field since middle school.  Did you know that there’s a whole list of things that media practitioners can’t do? They can’t donate to groups. They can’t protest publicly. (Yes, it’s true. We went through a whole month of what you can and can't do as a "journalist" in my capstone course) They can’t do so many things in the name of neutrality, and yet they do them anyways.

Watch FOX, CBS, NBC, CNN. You can see a pattern in their stories. Who shows more Obama-positive news? More negative? “Gay rights” versus “marriage equality”? Who calls them “illegal immigrants” versus “undocumented workers”? Which paper covered Benghazi? Yeah.... “the unbiased media” AH HAHAHAHAAH....

This is why I don't want anything to do with journalism