Presenting at VIDM!

As promised in yesterday's post, I wanted to share my experience presenting at VIDM. 

First of all, for those that don't know, VIDM is the Virtual International Day of the Midwife Conference which takes place every day and involves a 24 hours worldwide conference of presentations, posters and collaboration. The staff were all amazing in the lead up and it was real honour to be apart of the programme. I believe we were once again the only students on the oral presentation programme, but I learnt, we also had posters up too! I actually felt awful because I hadn't informed any of the others involved but nevertheless, with an emailed certificate, I hope it was okay. 

We've presented the research a number of times now, at IDM last year we presented it preliminary, but also at two faculty level events and to out cohort. Of course, I've also presented it at the RCM Research conference but sadly Bea couldn't make it to that one. I was so excited to have her with me this time and I wasn't nervous at all, especially because the viewers couldn't actually see us. 

Well the time to present came and I opened up by discussing how excited I was to have Bea there and then when it came to her turn to speak, her microphone wasn't working and so after a few failed attempts and me unable to get access to her notes, I literally had to do the whole thing by myself and wing it. It was a complete mess! 

The best things were that there were so many staff and students watching the presentation and hearing me while talk to the best of my knowledge, Bea was more involved on some of the concepts and therefore better equipped to talk about them. Also, it's recorded and will be uploaded to their YouTube channel very soon. So if you want to watch me mess up, go ahead. It was session 21, Room 3. 

One of the things I was so annoyed about was the questions because as soon as it had finished, I thought of much better answers, especially regarding the lack of opportunity to gain an insight. I think with so many great books coming out, social media journeys on Instagram and vlogs, there are more ways being utilised for pre-students to gain an insight into the course prior to commencing. That would have been a much better answer than what I said...I've blocked it out it was that bad! 

Anyway, if you do go watch it, let me know what you think!