Reed G Porter Online

Last year I signed up to teach a class at UMCK’s Communiversity. I proposed a class about how to intensify a résumé and even came up with a web site idea to support it. My proposal was accepted and the class was scheduled for March 18th, 2010. (This is why last week’s MyOTRadio was cancelled).

I spend some quality time designing the web site and putting together the presentation. I’m just a guy, but felt I had some good insight into what works and what definitely does not work when it comes to résumés.

Last Thursday finally arrives and I drive the 2.5 hours to UMKC in Kansas City. I find the class location in the Student Center (which looks suspiciously like a student union).  The classroom is a conference room wit seating for 12 around four tables pushed together.  The next thing I notice is that there is no projector.  Immediately the part of in Alice’s Restaurant where Officer Obie notices the the judge has a seeing eye dog:

Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, ’cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn’t nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn’t going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

It was beginning to look like nobody was going to see my 28 PowerPoint slides all formatted with animated fly-ins and pictures and speaker notes on nearly every single one.

Once I was finally able to catch my breath and think a minute, I decided my slides would be just as good on a 15.4 inch laptop screen as a the 10 foot projected screen I had envisioned. So I set up my laptop. turned it around and had the 9 attendees sit at the other 3 tables and I sat next to the laptop.  I used the entire 2 hours with a short break in the middle.  The students were all interest and thanked me so over all, I’d say it was a smashing success.