Day 7..

Day 7: 26 February


What a start to the day. As usual got up at 5 and it was a city covered with snow that said Good Morning! It had snowed through the night and it was serene everywhere. The real problem started later. The bus service was badly hit. No buses were plying. I waited for it for around an hour. Ordered cab – and again waited. Finally, Binay had to drop me on his way to office. And it was just in time for the feedback session presentation scheduled at 9.30. Here we gave the presentation which was supposed to be a final drill for the grand competition next day. The judges gave us feedback on which we worked on for some time. In between we also found out time to have photo ops in the snow cover around the campus. Sreejith booked an appointment with Suzy – the faculty for communications and leadership programs at UW. She is a former theater actor and teaches presentation skills. She spent more than 2 hours with us – giving us tips, suggestions and hearing out our presentation – and helping it to completely revamp it.

One thing that Americans do is appreciate others really honestly and expressively – to the point it becomes embarrassing (may be we Indians are not good at giving or receiving appreciation)
We received a lot of this appreciation and hence confidence in ourselves. The presentation was significantly changed and practiced again and again and again to the point of being extremely meticulous. In fact, timings were taken on each slide, extra flab was cut wherever necessary and it resulted in lots of information being packed into the 10 minutes we had (the point was later appreciated by 1 of the judges in the preliminary rounds as well)

All this while we also made new friends – all from different countries from Ghana to Canada to Mexico – everywhere. The day ended with Raka and me running to his friends house in Redmond and getting his stuff over to Anu’s place so that we could leave easily for the airport next day. So it was 48 to Montlake, changing to 545 to Redmond. Back on 545 to MontLake and then 43 to Broadway. We are now adept at moving around in Seattle..