Just because you're done preparing your presentation, doesn't mean you're done

My friends took a large trip to Punta Cana over spring break and kept posting their AH-MAZING photos in the sun...

Meanwhile, I was in the middle of nowhere in Upstate New York, where the snow was stale and crunchy in my brother's backyard and slushy and muddy on the sidewalks and roads. I knew for a while that I was going to have to do work over spring break, but it didn't make it any easier.

Relay for Life is my absolute favorite day of the year, and due to scheduling restrictions between both MIT and Harvard's academic calendars, we had planned to have the event the weekend after getting back from spring break. Being one of the directors of this event, I knew things would come up and get in the way of doing work the entire week leading up to the event. So in preparation, I managed to get most of my work done over spring break, holed up in my brother's yet-to-be-renovated "guest bedroom." Basically the opposite of the sunny beaches of the Dominican Republic...

But I knew it would be worth it! All semester, all anyone wants is extra time. So it was my theory that by instead of ignoring my work all of spring break, I would get it done, simultaneously catching up and getting ahead. I got so much done!

I acutally managed to even get my entire presentation together for 20.109! It was the first paper that I was able to understand completely by myself (not to say I didn't need Google), so you could imagine my excitement and supsequent over-confidence.

The week of the presentation, I didn't practice it. All day every day pretty much was spent coordinating details for Relay and getting people excited to come to the event. While a worthy cause, I neglected to remember the importance of sleep before a presentation. In my mind, I had done all the work for the presentation already, so it was off of my to-do list completely.

Basically, what I'm getting at is that my brain felt like this the morning of the presentation:
And it took it out on my body. I was shaking, dizzy, and would intermittently lose feeling in some of my limbs~shivers remembering that feeling~. I had heard of people working themselves "into the ground," and I even thought I had experienced that before. NOPE! This is what they meant.

So I ended up getting throught the presentation, but not like I had planned. I had planned on being entertaining and energetic, but I ended up just spitting up a boring script out of my mouth. I still was able to explain everything (I think), but because of my lack of ability to take care of myself, I had a ton of trouble even processing sentences. And if this isn't how I looked, it's certainly how I felt:
Overall, I learned a very important lesson. While you may be able to get away with being completely exhausted and doing psets and work that gets turned in, a presentation means actually being *presentable.* So the next time I have a presentation or something similar, I'm going to make sleeping, eating, and drinking water a part of the assignment.





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