Case Study

Meet Felix, a final-year student studying Architecture and Data Analytics at Jomo Kenyatta University. He's participating in a 2-month virtual internship at Newcastle Partners, a consulting firm in Bristol. As part of a team designing a new city park, Felix is asked to create proposal for the park's visitor center. He's given a few weeks to prepare, then present his findings and recommendations to a group that includes his fellow interns, their manager Michael, and senior consultants at Newcastle Partners.

Felix is excited about this task. He believes the visitor center can set the stage for the entire experience of the park. For two weeks, he immerses himself in extensive research, watching videos of other parks layouts, and reading articles.

A few days before the presentation, Felix has gathered a lot of facts and has many ideas. He opens a blank slide to prepare the presentation, but struggles to figure out how to approach it. So, he decides to write instead. He writes a 5-page summary and proposal. He enjoys drafting the summary, and realizes that he has in-depth knowledge of the topics.

The night before the presentation, Felix still has not put together his slides, a task he dreads because he doesn't enjoy design. He finally picks a template from Powerpoint, then adds the text from his written summary on the slides. Where possible, be breaks it up into bullet points to make it easier to read and digest. When he's describing examples from other places, he takes screenshots of images of those visitor centers and adds them to his slides. Some of the images are low-resolution, but he assumes bad visuals are better than no visuals.

All in all, his slide presentation comes to about 30 pages. He only has 20 minutes for his presentation, but he believes he can get through it. He practices reading the first few slides, and he's able to do each one in about 30 seconds. He doesn't do a full practice, but he's confident based on the first slides and his deep knowledge of the material.

On the day of the presentation, Felix feels a wave of nervousness. When it is his time to present, he struggles to share the screen with only his presentation slides, and not also show his summary report. He fixes it after a few minutes, but the rough start has heightened his nerves. He wills himself to calm down, and begins his presentation. His slides, filled with lengthy paragraphs, were difficult for the audience to follow. Felix often read directly from the slides, rather than elaborating on the points, which made his delivery monotonous and unengaging. He did not pause to ask questions or invite interaction, which resulted in a one-sided presentation.

When the 20 minutes are up, the timer goes off with about 10 slides still left to go. Felix ends the presentation abruptly, without a clear summary of key points or a compelling conclusion. He asks if anyone has questions.

His manager Michael says:

Coach Felix

❓ Imagine you are Felix's manager Michael and you are writing him a brief email to give feedback on his presentation. What would you say to him?

Share your draft email in Slack.