The second day at Hong Kong. Me and my team wake up with the sleepy face as we did not get much sleep last night because of busy preparing the presentation. Whole day long of training is waiting for us, we took a short walk from student hall resident to PolyU campus. Not really far actually, but it was very convenience as we didn’t require to cross a single road. The path to the campus are on the sky bride. Cool man and the campus is huge!

We had short briefing about the competition before we went for the campus tour. On the briefing, we only figure out that we were only provided with one and only one projector which is connected with the PC with the power point presentation only. Gosh, how are we suppose to show our software solution which is in our tablet PC? Then we try to request for switching between the PC and our tablet PC, but we got rejected and told that it is not fair if we bringing another PC for the competition. I was kind of wordless that time and think, how suppose that an additional PC will bring in unfair advantages for other competitors? Well, I guess previously no other teams bring in any software product for competition, but only hardware products. I guess we need to come out with plan B without any demo because we might not be able to bring in the tablet PC at all. This is definitely a disadvantage for our team and part of our preparation last night gone for nothing!

We tour around the campus lead by Jackie. She show us a lot of interesting places in the campus. Computer room, innovation center, sport area, canteen, and the list continue. All building name is name with a person’s name. Hmm, it must be hard to remember all the building name, that why all building is given an alphabet. After the tour, I can said PolyU is a really nice place and environment for study. We even had our lunch at the canteen in the campus. I love their canteen food, clean and delicious! Yammy!

Today training was about presentation. A last minute presentation skill polishing for all competitors. John Miers was our speaker today. He gave a good talk about presentation but I was too tired and start fishing at the end of the talk. John said that business presentation is similar like general public speaking, which I can’t really agree with it. We will given only 20 minutes time to present our solution and we can’t really take a slow pace word by word with pause because we will definitely run out of time that way. Pause in between the word may sound ok for general public speaking but I guess is not so ok for business presentation as the audience might think that you came on stage without a full preparation. Well, I did agree with some of the point he mention, such as relaxing, present like you talk with your friend, and 25 second rule for answering question.

After the whole day talk, we were going to have our dinner at Star Ferry Cruise! It sound so exited for us. This was the first time I broad on a cruise (on sea, last time I did on a river), and it was very shaky! Lucky I was able to hold on with the seasick. The view of the cruise was really nice. I can see the Hong Kong city lighting up at night. No wonder people keep on saying that Hong Kong night view is the best, now I know why.

Finally the dinner is over, time to go back to student hall resident and do our final preparation for presentation because tomorrow will be our judgment day. Gosh, we need to overcome our sleepiness and come out with a new plan without the live demo of our solution. It is going to be a sleepless night again.

by Ooi Keng Siang via Ooiks’s Blog