I Got Tips

Let me veer away from all the emotions that entangle our human lives and share with you something that I hope both students and professionals will find useful. I’m no expert or anything but a lot of people have been telling me that I got a knack for this so here I am, hoping to give away a little bit of food for thought. 

I’m currently taking my master’s degree and I know I’m young but I don’t see any reason why anyone should put off professional and academic growth for a later time. If you have the chance now, grab it. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself for it once you’re done. Having said this, the thing that I always encounter in grad school are professors complaining about how students present their report. Nowadays, we use MS Powerpoint to make things easier and students always fall into the tendency of just copying and pasting everything on the slides and then conducting a reading session at the time of reporting, which should not be the case. Despite the constant reminders of professors on how to appropriately utilize MS Powerpoint as an effective method of imparting knowledge, students never seem to pay any mind. Reporting becomes one reading session after another, which in grad school, is simply unacceptable. You’re supposed to be moving forward academically, not stuck within the confines of reading out loud.

My number one tip to be an effective presenter/reporter in class is to remember everything that you hate seeing with other reporters, so you’ll know what you should not do. If you fall asleep when someone just reads their report, don’t do it. If you find slides crowded with words confusing, don’t do it. Everything you hate, don’t do it. 

Top two tip of mine that you should always remember is to let go of the connotation that you are dependent on your powerpoint presentation. You are not. And you shouldn’t be. It’s the other way around, your powerpoint presentation should depend on you for it to make sense. Create your slides in such a way that without you explaining it, they would just be a couple of words and pictures on a slide. Nothing more.

Top three tip is to know your assigned topic by heart. Read it once, read it twice, read it five times. Read it until the words become engraved in your head. Read it until you arrive at your own interpretation of the concepts. Read it until you find it simple. Only then will you realize that you no longer have the need to copy and paste all the words to your slides because they can just come from you instead.

Top four tip is to embrace confidence. If you know for yourself you’re not confident at all, then just be smart enough not to let it show. Practice on delivering your presentation beforehand. Practice talking until your voice stops quivering and try holding something like a pen (even if you’re never going to use it) just to keep your hands from shaking, and also for you to have something to focus all your nervous energy on. 

Top five tip is to know where your professor have set his/her standards, pay attention on what they want to hear from you so you’ll know what to deliver. Work hard to meet their standards not because you want to please them but because you owe yourself the chance of stepping up and giving it your best shot. Use their ridiculously hifalutin demands to break your old habits and catalyze your betterment. 

Now, just to top it all off, let me give you quick tips on how to make your powerpoint presentation better.

This slide is from my presentation earlier.

1. Use as less words as possible. 60% of what people learn is through vision so use that to your advantage. I’ve read articles suggesting that you should keep your lines at about 6-7 per slide but I personally prefer to just keep it at 4 sentences or less per slide then just use pictures for the rest.

2. Make sure that you always put the title of what you’re discussing on your slides (in my case, that is “Physiology of Wound Healing) so your audience won’t get lost, even if they just stepped in because they’re late or they just came back from the comfort room, they’d be able to immediately catch up on what you’re talking about. 

3. Notice the upper right corner of my slide? Those are my sources. In grad school, it’s a requirement to put them in your presentation so your professor can check whether or not the information you’re imparting is credible. In undergrad, I don’t think it’s as important yet but still if you decide on citing your sources, I suggest you use the APA format.

4. Keep the words on your slide readable, make sure they don’t clash with the pictures. Use fonts that are appropriate and easy to read. Also, don’t use colors that will distract the audience from your discussion.

5. Keep your presentation neat, organized and professional. Don’t let it look like something that’s just been put together out of the blue (even if you just finished it the night before). 

So there you go. That’s all I have for now. I hope it helped.

Scars are Beautiful

And there I was, staring at the ceiling in the middle of the day, counting the minutes as they pass by. Every second stretched on for miles and I found myself drowning in my own, self-orchestrated eternity. This kind of thing usually happens in the middle of the night when you’re up and thinking about somebody but it hit me way earlier than it should. It hit me while the sun was at its highest and people were supposed to do nothing but complain about the heat and the sweat dripping off their face and back. But not me. I laid there, on my bed, motionless, almost breathless but with my thoughts running a million miles per second and my heart pumping way more than it should.

I laid so still that my emotions swallowed me whole. I didn’t fight, I didn’t resist. I let the pain strike me where it wanted to. I let the past constrict me with its grip-like vice. But it wasn’t a sign of surrender nor was it a sign of giving up. It was more like I wanted to feel everything instead of keeping it suppressed. It was like wanting to drown so I’ll be forced to swim. It’s like wanting to remember the pain so I’ll know never to go back to the way I was. 

A song kept playing in my head—“Oh, you’re a silly girl…” and I am a silly girl. Silly but not foolish. Have I not made it this far in life? All the tears and and pain and unfortunate twists of life that I was never sure if they were meant to be bad jokes or just simply ugly phases you have to go through, embraced and molded me. The more I think about it, the more I found it beautiful. How a silly little girl can slowly turn into a woman of flaming self-respect all because of those sleepless nights crying over things that broke her, those times that she had to pick herself up everyday just to show everybody she’ll be okay, all those tireless days that she was let down repeatedly despite of her efforts to hold things together. It’s those things that will slowly forge strength in your heart.

Men collect their scars physically as a sign of manhood. Women, on the other hand, collect scars emotionally. They are oh so fragile that words and phrases delivered in haste would leave bleeding wounds unseen by many. I’ve had lots of wounds, I even had a part of my heart taken out of me but I stitched it up. Everything can be mended through time so just let the days pass by. You’ll be surprised that at some point, that dark corner where your soul has been would feel like a hundred years away and would only sound like a terrible part of an old fairy tale you once read.

And when the memories come knocking one day, like what happened to me today, I suggest you let it in. Immerse yourself in its arms but don’t dwell in it. Let that visit remind you of how far you’ve come and how much you’ve changed for the better. Let it rekindle the amazing journey you’ve had to be the woman you are today. Let it show you the petals and thorns you’ve earned by blooming into an exquisite rose. Embrace your scars and let them make you beautiful. 

Can I…? Would you?

Type. Backspace. Type. Backspace. Type. Backspace. Type.

Always caught in between writing it down and keeping it to the farthest corners of myself.

Can I ask you to listen? And if I do ask you, would you? I feel like I’ve wasted and gained so much time. I feel like I’ve constantly done nothing and everything each passing day. I feel like the greatest ironies and contradictions of life have run me down. It’s like standing at a crossroad feeling depressed and thankful at the same time. Does everybody my age feel this way? Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m alone in this. Maybe I’m not.

Can I ask you to see things my way? And if I do, would you? I see millions of possibilities conspiring into one moment. It scares me and it fascinates me. Imagine hitting an imaginary brick wall. The brick wall symbolizes that you’ve achieved something and is now ready to move forward but instead of smiling, you just stand there asking yourself, now what? It’s not that you don’t know where to go, you do. It’s not that you don’t know how to get there, you do. It’s just that you’re scared of what comes next.

Can I ask you to take me away? And if I do ask you, would you? We can talk about anything, do anything, be anything. We can take a bus or just drive. We can joke about life as if we’re not in it. We can act as if time is on our side. People say to live a life that you don’t constantly want to run away from. But is there such a life? I think people invented vacations, getaways and holidays because none of us were meant to stay in one place doing one thing for too long. We’ve got the means so why not go somewhere we’ve never been and make memories that’ll fill our hearts?

Can I ask you to pursue happiness with me? And if I do ask you, would you? I haven’t smiled today. I haven’t laughed. I haven’t felt anything. It’s like there’s this tremendous distance between me and everything real. I feel like I’m floating, searching for something to grab on to so I can pull myself down and start to feel something again. I want to laugh the way I did for the past days. But I just feel like a bottle that’s just been sealed. I feel like I’ve been given an ultimatum until further notice and everything I planned just vanished in front of me. 

Can I keep on asking? And if I do, would you keep on answering? I feel like crying but that’s nothing new. I feel like punching something but I don’t want to break anything. I feel like I’m going to be staring at the brick wall in front of me for a long while and I hate waiting for realizations to hit me in the head. I feel like everything stopped despite seeing everything still moving and the earth still rotating on its axis. I wonder what happens when someone, like me, just stops. Does the God of Time look down on me and ask “What the hell’s the matter with this girl?” Or does he say “Good thinking dear one. Sometimes stopping opens up the right way.”

Cheers!

It took me 22 years to realize that there are only two types of people in the world—those who keep the world happy and those who keep the world going. 

Those who keep the world happy are the ones who have the talent and passion to create. They’re writers, painters, musicians, movie makers—all are slaves to inspiration and all are artists in their own right. They keep the world happy in what way? By coming up with piece after piece of creativity that may not be necessary for living but is food for the soul. They keep the unseen part of humanity fed and fulfilled. 

Those who keep the world going are the ones who have the skills to keep civilization on its feet. They’re politicians, doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers—all are slaves to knowledge and all are professionals in their respective fields. They keep the world going in what way? By maintaining everything that humanity established as important—technology, industry, health, government. They reinforce human needs to its finest. 

Most people end up doing what they were meant to do and find themselves happy doing it. Some encounter resistance and find themselves stuck in the middle of life’s highway. Guess I’m part of the latter. I know that I should be one of those people working to keep the world going but my hands are focused on creating and my heart is just head over heels with writing. 

I can be good at any job if I wanted to just so people wouldn’t say that I’m wasting “my brains” into something so simple as writing. But when I get compliments from other people about how I should already be writing a book or receiving an award for something I wrote, I just feel like going against the flow and pursuing writing like a reckless youth in pursuit of happiness at whatever cost. But I guess I’m not as brave as I’d like to be.

So let me raise a glass up for all the things your heart dictates but your mind deem impossible, for all the passion you put into making the world see something new instead of just keeping it going, for all my fellow literary souls out there who sleeps with a pen in their hand every single night trying to make other people see how beautiful words are—salut!