Last Thursday I had to give a small lecture to the 250 students in the Intro to Psychology class. Luckily the TA’s got to pick what we wanted to talk about in the abnormal psychology chapter. I am glad that we got the abnormal chapter because I have found this section to be extremely interesting. I have also been in the abnormal psychology class so I have been exposed to the material a lot so I am comfortable with talking about the topics.
Another benefit about giving the lecture was that Dr. Gurung gave us the PowerPoint slides before hand so we did not need to create our own. Not creating our own slides has it’s ups and downs. A couple of good things about this would that we do not have to spend as much time creating/organizing the slides which gives us more time to be come comfortable with them. Another positive side would that we do not have figure out how many slides we should put up or if there is too much on each slide.
Some of the negative factors would be that we do not get the experience of creating our own lecture material (but we have done two review sessions that has allowed us to create more PowerPoint presentations). Another factor would be that unlike me some people may have felt more comfortable with the material if they would have created the slides themselves.
After looking over the slides I first decided that I wanted to do suicide and schizophrenia. The suicide slide interested me a lot because I am a RA and have been looking at a lot of research dealing with college student suicide. My honors project is also on this topic. This topic feels like second nature to me now. The schizophrenia slides I wanted to do because the topic intrigues me and because I have seen a couple of movies dealing with this (aka. A Beautiful Mind).
However there would not have been enough time for me to do the schizophrenia slides the same day the rest of the TA’s were doing their slides. This did bother me a little bit because I felt it would have been a little strange to present the week after the rest of the TA’s did their lectures and I did not think it would flow as smoothly. I wanted to feel as comfortable as possible while talking to 250 students so I chose to do the slides on SAD. I felt confident talking about these slides as well because it involves some biology concepts and with me being a human bio major I had already been exposed to those.
The actual day of the lecture was a little nerve racking because I was unsure how the microphones were going to work (which that did not go to smoothly lol). However it did help that I was the last one to go (except I kept looking at the clock during my lecture). Once I started talking a strange calm came over me and most of my nerves went away. I say this was strange because I felt significantly more calm in front of 250 students than I had in both of my review sessions with just 50 students. This could have been for a number of reasons. One reason would be that I only had to talk for about 10 minutes compared to 80 minutes in the review sessions. I also had the other TA’s there and Dr. Gurung (this was kind of like moral support). I definitely feel a lot less nervous when talking to a big crowd and I feel that this lecture was overall a great experience.