I really enjoyed the topic I had for this presentation. I have always loved sports, and I have an interest in the effect that sports have on the body of the athletes involved. I was able to do research on a topic that I genuinely wanted to know more about. This led me down many rabbit holes where I was able to collect information I probably never would’ve found if I was just doing the research as fast as possible to get the project over with. This project was one of the few that I’ve done in which I enjoyed finding new information and putting together my paper/presentation.

One thing I struggled with was finding reliable information. Some studies have significantly different information than other studies based on player selection and length of career. For example, a kicker that had a 1 year NFL Career is going to have significantly less head trauma than a running back who played 15 years in the NFL. Larger studies always had the most accurate information, so I tried to source as much information as possible from them.

One thing I liked about my presentation was my slideshow. I feel like it was concise while still providing important context to what I had to say. I also feel like the color scheme was vibrant enough to get the audience’s attention without being distracting. I also thought I had a good tone, especially at the end when I proposed the questions “is there a solution?” and “can we justify this?”.

The obvious thing I would change about my speech would be the error with the video. When I had practiced, I ran into very few issues with the video, so I am not sure what happened. The video added important context to my topic and I feel like my overall presentation was worse without it. I did recover well from the error though, and I made the best out of the situation.

Overall, I enjoyed this project. My topic interested me and I had a good time writing my paper and putting together the presentation. The thing that bothered me the most was definitely being on camera. I’m not sure why, but the camera was a lot more daunting to me than a full classroom.