Show time!

Today was the big day: our Company presentations. There were 10 companies being presented, each twice by 20 groups. Half of them were presented in the morning and half in the afternoon after our lunch break. Luckily, My group, along with Jacky’s and Beilul’s, was to present in the afternoon. Although Reneta and Mark constantly stressed that we do not freak out, use space fillers, or ramble on, the first few groups were definitely nervous. Before we even arrived at the building, most groups were outside the classroom rehearsing their parts and glancing at their notes. I felt very confident in the morning when I saw this and realized that I was one of the very few groups who did not even have notes to use, we simply knew what we were going to say.

It was interesting to hear about all these different hotels, including Marriot, Hyatt, Intercontinental, IHG, Choice and Hilton, especially because they were being presented twice. I felt that both versions were very good and I learned something new from the second presentations.

My nerves start kicking in a little bit in the afternoon as I saw groups who went above and beyond with advanced visuals and even a scenario in which a different group member put on some music, left the room, and then returned as the music started playing, introducing himself and his members in a humorous manner.
Although I was initially intimidated, I knew that my group would do fine. Eventually came the first Best Western group, and I was somewhat surprised. Their introductory slide was essentially the same as ours, with even the same slide layout and colors. Their Overview slide was formatted the same way ours was. The bits of information that they had to say seemed to resonate in perfect harmony with what we had, maybe I was just unreasonable, since we did have the same hotel. My group members looked nervously at each other, as we discovered that what they said was kind of like ours, except more advanced and with more engaging visuals.

As they finished I put my hesitations aside and the four of us walked bravely to the front of the room. Now, normally, in any other regular high school presentation, I would forget what I presented in a few hours. But right now I could tell you all about Best Western. That made all the difference in our presentation. It ran smoothly, I want to say, in the sense that it went as we practiced the night before. Everyone said all their parts and looked at the audience the entire time. In the end, I was very proud of my group for working so hard for our 8-9 minutes in front of 80 people.

In the end, Mark and Reneta were overall pleased with everyone, and they not only decided that we would have no homework tonight, but also that there would be no mandatory office hours tonight. However, we still have a quiz tomorrow on all the hotels, and I would like to dedicate the rest of my night to studying for it. Goodbye for now!