[MUSIC] All right, so you've seen us presenting some technical solutions. And hopefully we've made it look pretty easy. But it turns out, it takes a lot of practice. So, what we're going to do for the rest of this week. Is we're going to give you the skills to practice your own technical explanations. And we're going to do a lot of practice. Talk about some common pitfalls and how you can recover from those pitfalls. In this video in particular, we're going to look at some evaluation criteria. What are the people who are watching you, who are interviewing you, really looking for in these videos? And we're going to use this evaluation criteria as a frame work throughout the rest of the week. So, what are they looking for when they ask you to present or talk about some work that you've done? Are they looking to see whether you're a genius? That you're the next big thing? That you've got the next idea that's going to turn into a company as big as Google, and revolutionize the world? Well no, of course they're not looking for that. They're looking just to see that you are a competent person who is good at solving problems. They want to know about your thought process. And they want to know about your communication skills. So, they want to know, did you solve an interesting problem and can you communicate it. What was your solution? Was it novel? Was it interesting? So all of this, as you saw in our examples, can be made to look pretty easy. But as I mentioned before, it's really difficult and it takes a lot of practice to develop a good explanation. So, let's take a look at how you can approach this problem. And then in particular let's frame it around how you're going to be evaluated on this task. So, you can avoid some common pitfalls in this process. So, the approach that you may have seen online. That's kind of all over the place is that when you're presenting this technical work you'll use something called the STAR method. So, this is a very nice approach to presenting your work, and STAR is an acronym. It stands for situation, task, action, and result, so STAR. So in this situation part, you want to talk about what was the situation in which you were solving a problem? Who was involved? What is the sort of context of the problem you were trying to solve? Then you'll go on to the task. So, what was exactly the problem you were trying to solve? Why should people really care about it? Then you can go on to the action. What was the solution that you presented? What did you actually do? And then, of course, what was the result? Did it actually solve the problem? How did you know? How do you know? So, all of these pieces need to be present in your technical explanation. What we're going to do in this week is, we're going to take the STAR model. And we're going to group it a little bit differently. So, we can really get at some of the real challenges to developing this technical presentation. And talk about some of the common pitfalls that we see. So, what we're going to do, is divide this into three lessons. Where first, we focus on the problem, so pitching the problem. How do you effectively pitch and problem and it's context so that the people you're talking to will care about your problem and see that you know why that problem is important? And this roughly corresponds to the S and the T, the situation and the task portion of that star model. In the next lesson, we'll talk about the solution. So, what was your technical solution? Why did it solve the problem? Why was it innovative and creative? That piece roughly corresponds to the A and R, the Action and the Result. And then in the last part, we'll talk about technical communication and group work skills, more of these soft skills. Now, these soft skills aren't explicitly mentioned in the star model. But obviously, they're going to be a critical piece of your technical explanation in an interview situation. So, throughout the week, we'll look at each of these components. And we'll be giving you some examples of some good examples. As well as some pitfalls and some bad examples. To show you what to avoid and how to avoid making these same mistakes. So, we're looking forward to getting started.
