Valery Butto Blog #2

 Hello again, everyone! As you may remember from my last blog, my name is Valery, and I am the group leader for group three. We were assigned, once again, another presentation we had to complete as a group. Group one and two chose their topic quickly, so we were quite literally left with the topic of:

Infrastructure. 

Infrastructure is a great topic to discuss in a presentation, and I had a good time researching it. I felt like I entered a subject that I had never explored before, and had fun doing so. One of the most memorable things I learned is why the United State's public transport system is inferior to, for example, but not limited to, the ones in Europe. This is because the US values transportation as welfare, meaning that you're considered better off if you have your own means of transportation, such as a car or motorcycle. In the US, public transport is considered to be only for those who cannot afford their own means of transportation, thus the prices for the rides have to be low. The problem is if the prices are low, then the budget for maintenance is low, and the buses, metros, etc, won't be as cared for as they are in other countries. This gives rise to another problem: the personnel. If the rides are priced too low, then there won't be enough money to give employees an income, so the routes will only be accessible for a limited amount of time, and only during some hours of the day. All this arises from the fact that most of the US has a car-based mentality.

I have a few other things that come to mind when I think of the memorable research I made for this presentation. For example, I interviewed Rita Carbonell from the Public Works Department in Doral. She gave me some insight on what Doral's strengths and weaknesses are, as well as how they are constantly improving and trying to come out on top. Since Doral is a fairly new city, they have good infrastructure. They're always trying to keep the city going by working on new projects as often as possible. And it's true! If you drive around Doral, there's always a road being constructed, getting renewed, a bridge is being given maintenance and many other things. One of the things Doral struggles with is private roads. Since they're private, they don't really have much control of what goes on in them and how to properly care for them. They also struggle with people disposing of their trash on roads and bridges. Apparently, people like to dispose of big electronics, like fridges, and just leave them there. It causes logistics problems as to what to do with that trash and where remove it to. 

Now, enough with my memorable information. This paragraph is all about outlines and planning. We began working on the presentation by making a quick outline of what each person was going to do. This outline would later serve as our agenda. I'm going to be a little honest here, in the beginning, this presentation was tough work on. People were unresponsive and weren't really giving much feedback. After a few classes, we managed to work out a mini outline of the presentation, and assigned who was going to work on what, it had to go smoothly from there. Or so we would've thought. But I'll get to that later. After the outline, we started working on the study guide. Nicole copied all the words into a doc, assigned the words to each person, and then we just had to fill them in. Finally, once our next class arrived, we made yet another outline for our brochure and using the whiteboard function on Blackboard I made a rough sketch of how it would look. Once all this planning was done, all that was left was to sit down and work on the presentation itself...right?

Wrong. One of our group mates, who had been absent throughout most of the semester, was dropped from the class. This gave us issues because who was going to do his part of the work? Eventually, I ended up filling his words on the study guide, and we just eliminated his part from the presentation completely. It took some time to fill up the works, however, the outline was the very first thing finished. It would later really serve as a guide of what we had to work on. Next up was the study guide. Once that was filled up, Priscila copied the words from the doc and transferred them to her own beautiful template on PowerPoint. I finished it up by putting quick summaries at the beginning of each chapter. Finally, the presentation was finished a day before it was due. And after some last-minute fixes, we were all ready to present. 

The presentation went mostly smoothly, except for one little incident in the beginning. I was kind of put on the spot and had to create an impromptu introduction for our presentation. I hadn't practiced it beforehand, so really I had nothing prepared. It's a good thing that I don't have much of on an issue when it comes to improvising. I basically told the class a quick outline (I feel like I've used this word too many times in this blog) of what my part of the presentation was about. After that was done, the rest of the group and I proceeded to deliver our monologues smoothly. 

For the conclusion, Maria, our wonderful class leader, did a jeopardy game on infrastructure. Group three were kind of the lab rats for this game, as we were the first group and didn't know how it was gonna work. Luckily, it ended up going very well, and it was super fun to play! I shared my screen with the blue boxes while Maria talked and gave people hints on the question's answers. 

This presentation had a fun topic, even though we were quite skeptical of it at first as we didn't really choose it, it was basically just the last out of three. Researching was fun, presenting was fun, and doing the jeopardy game was fun. We had a few issues with creating the presentation, but somehow we managed to overcome everything and give out the best that we could!