For those of you joining the UVa blog for the first time, I won't repeat everything -- please go back a few pages for my older posts, but the question posed to us was: should Rolls-Royce develop a military trainer engine or a civilian turboprop engine? My group's answer was...
Neither. We rejected both projects, and suggested an entirely new one.
It's my understanding from the professors that no one's done this in the history of comm school projects, so to say my group was.. entertaining would be quite an understatement. And as soon as our decision spread like wildfire through the comm school (because one of my group members let it slip.. *coughcough*, we became the talk of the building.
To save you guys the big 70 page paper or whatever it was, my group suggested nanotechnology, and I'll leave my lovably vague answer at that. I'd like to focus more on the presentation itself. Remember when I said Rolls-Royce sent a whole fleet of executives and we were a bit intimidated? Welladay.
First off, I'd have to say that our presentation was very polished, and our professors and the executives agreed. We were up until 2 am the day off practicing, and got back at 7 am to practice some more. So we had the jokes, the opening lines, and the transitions down pat. We actually spent a bit of time arguing how much science of the nanotechnology (and alternative fuels) we should put into our slides, but still got commented that we put too much science in.
We opened with the quote "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference". (I have a magnet of that on my fridge now, one of my group members gave it to me today as a belated Christmas present of sorts. We've just vested so much of our lives in this project.. =P ). From there on we knocked down the two projects they gave us in quick order, and then launched into the meat of our presentation.
We actually focused a lot on nanotechnology and alternative fuels, probably more than we wanted to. In part, we wanted to give them a jolt. After all, these executives had been listening to the same presentations for the past two days. We wanted to give them something different. And we were certainly that. After we ended, with a completely black slide that had the words Rolls Royce. Making the Difference. slowly fade in (my idea by the way! I'm still so proud of it, haha.), the executives gave us a breather in saying we were very bold, and then pulled on the boxing gloves.
We definitely got grilled hard, but I'm proud of my teammates and how they stepped up to the challenge. Our guy in charge of oil talked in so many circles that my own head was spinning at the end, but the person who asked the question seemed quite impressed. It was definitely an experience, some parts of which I'm not sure I'd like to remember, but hey, it's all part of comm school, and college academics in general.
So with that, I promise that's the last I'll grouse about this project. And ahh yes, I'm well aware that with this post, it's probably very easy to guess who I am. Although I've tried to not let too many obvious details about me slip (I'd like to do some reveal type thing when I graduate! =D ), there's only one group in my block, and only so many girls. My fellow classmates in the comm school, have fun guessing!
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