Day 5 (Friday, March 2013)

The final presentation. The end.

Today, I woke up with highly motivated: it was the last day and we were supposed to give a presentation on the water system we designed through the week.

During the morning, we made the last improvements on the slides we already presented yesterday. Despite the fact that we were almost ready, everyone was really busy in the team and we were all nervous. The training we made before lunch was constructive for all teams. We met the timing by doing a seventy-five minute presentation, which was really interesting and well articulated. I especially liked the presentation the waste/food group made: they completely made their presentation within the morning and their Prezi was colorful and readable.

Regarding our own presentation, I spoke first and made a stupid mistake in the very beginning by calling Francesco “Andrea”! I was under pressure but it relived me entirely, I laugh with everyone and then it was much easier to concentrate on the presentation. Our performance was good in my opinion, we knew that our main assets were the figures we were able to calculate and our main weak point the fact that we did not have a YUTPA analysis…

We had a short break before the jury arrived and then it was time to play the big game! Basically, we gave the same presentation as we made in the morning. As we were well established now, we ran smoothly. As expected, the jury noticed the weakness of our YUTPA analysis; still they liked the presentation and the accuracy of the figures.

Now, it is almost 4pm and the Athens course is over. I will remember this experience for a long time. I found myself confronted with a new field of engineering and some unexpected methods that completely destabilized me in the beginning, so that I almost decided to switch with another course at the end of the first day. But I am really happy to be left in this course in the end, because we face challenges, I worked with a group a amazing people and in the end came up with a impressive result for such a short week.

I am deeply interested in what I discovered this week, happy of what I did during the project, proud of what we achieved together…

Dilasser