The end is nigh....

After close to 10 weeks of work I was finally ready to deliver!

My final presentation was scheduled for a weekday afternoon, via a conference call that would be attended by some of EDF’s experts in nitrogen management and agriculture. I was nervous but comforted by the confidence my boss had displayed in my findings by inviting his colleagues to my briefing. I had never delivered a presentation over a conference call before and found the prospect of talking to a phone for 45 minutes discomforting! Nevertheless, I did the best I could and my audience followed along with the slides in front of them.

The presentation was over quicker than I thought it would be and there were plenty of questions as I went along. This resulted in my having to hurry up toward the end and skip over a few parts of my presentation. Luckily I did not have a hard audience and I was able to reach my conclusions and recommendations without a problem. On hindsight I would have had my boss moderate the entire presentation so that we limited questions during the presentation and saved more time to run through the slides. This is a common mistake and even harder to manger via a conference call with attendees dialing in from different locations. There are no substitutes for face to face meetings, it turns out!

On the whole, the internship was a great experience for me and hopefully provided EDF some good material and research on which to base their nitrogen interventions. I had the chance to learn about agriculture, cropping systems and the environmental impacts that fertilizers have on our natural resources. This is a big bonus for me as I’m also concurrently pursing a Master of Sicence and this definitely helped my understanding of agro-ecology. Finally, I was surprised to learn that it is remarkably easy to identify gaps and need for coordination when one talks to enough people with different points of view. My project is now wrapped up and I’m looking forward to working with EDF in the future again!