After staying in Berlin for three weeks, I have already had my first impression regarding the whole working system of IMK. And I really have a few questions to ask. Is it real that, in the real world, people may not present after being told to prepare? And is it “wise” to keep guessing who is going to present and who is not?
I do not have the working experience in advertising agencies. All I did is working in a TV station as a journalist. So I have never had the experience to present in front of my clients. I have to admit that I was truly shocked by IMK’s working system when they introduced it to us. Not all the teams who prepared for the presentation are going to present at the Friday presentation. Does that make sense? If I am not going to present, why do I need to prepare for that? If I am told to present, what is the reason for not presenting? During my study here, I tried my best to prepare for the Friday presentations. But it was such a disappointment when you heard someone announced that I was not included in the presenting list. Suddenly, all I did worth nothing. Then, I began to doubt myself. Why did I stay up all night? Why did I waste my time and energy on nothing? Why did I put myself in such a stress? Questions like those never ended. I know that I need to prepare for all the incidents, but definitely not the incidents like this.
The second question is the main point I want to discuss here in this blog. What’s the purpose for keeping guessing whether to present or not? The weird IMK presenting system was supposed to randomly pick six teams out of 16 every week. But in order to be fair enough, which is every team presents at least once during our study here, the word “randomly” no longer existed. So IMK students were so used to such “random” system and started to guess who was going to present this time and who was not. Once they believed that they were not going to present, they would barely do anything for the project, we became the only ones cared about presentation. Everything we said, everything we recommended didn’t mean anything to them. Even though we wanted to bring out a perfect presentation, no one is going to help us except ourselves. Obviously, such system does not help at all. Why do we study? To be honest, it is actually our own decision to get educated. What we want is to get well prepared before we step into the real competitive world. With all the money we paid, all the time and energy we devoted, why do we keep guessing and trying to escaping from doing our own works? Aren’t we supposed to learn? Such valuable experience should not be perceived as a burden, instead, we should treat each work we do is actually an opportunity to absorb new knowledge and to train our practical skills.
To some extent, these two questions have some sort of internal connections between each other. Because not every team needed to present on Friday, so they didn’t think it to be necessary to prepare for every single Friday. And because this system was actually not random, which gave them the opportunity to take a guess. So in my opinion, what they need to do is to give up this stupid presenting system either by turning it into real random system, or let every team present on Friday.
Hey Yiyi! I really like the article here above. I had the same kind of doubts myself. Moreover, I have been directly penalized by the IMK students "guessing approach" twice. The first time, I have been told that the chances we were gonna present were equal to zero. As a consequence, my teammates slacked off, and I had to do the entire job. On the top of that, we also had to present. The second time, everyone was skeptical in regard to the possibility that two additional teams could have been pulled out. Well, it turned out that my team was one of them (actually the only one). So, all in all I completely agree with you: IMK should give up this confusing and misleading presentation system.
ReplyDeleteHi Yiyi!
ReplyDeleteI see your point when you said that the IMK system is not the smartest one, at least for us. I think there was a kind of cultural shock, especially coming from the FIU system where the work that we do is actually acknowledge. And not only that, but the fact that they had to print the booklet 3 times in color and even put it nicely in a binder, it's crazy! Doing that everyweek for a semester is a LOT of money! And the worst part is that they dont even have printing facilities for the students. I believe there should definitevely be a change in their presenting procedure.