The Communication Factor
Newsletter of the Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication at Rice University Fall-2003

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Student Commentary: Anne van de Ven

As a first-year graduate student in the Bioengineering Department at Rice, I first heard about the Cain Project through through their involvement in my Cellular Engineering class last fall. Tracy Volz came to speak to us about how to give technical presentations. I was impressed by her knowledge and infectious enthusiasm, but most all, I was thrilled to discover that Rice had a program to help science students write and present data.

As an undergraduate, I never received tutorials or handouts on how to write essays or give presentations. I had to struggle through several years before I learned how to communicate scientific data effectively to many different audiences. Spring semester of this year, I was offered the exciting opportunity to be an oral presentations coach for the Bioengineering Senior Design class. The students of BIOE 452, split into five teams, were asked to design innovative new total artificial hearts.

Each team not only had to propose a design midway through the semester, but they also had to prepare detailed technical and business plans to present at the end of the semester. My role through the Cain Project involved helping each design team plan and rehearse its presentations, then giving feedback to aid the students in revising and improving their presentations before their in-class performance.

During my meetings with the individual design teams, I was repeatedly impressed by the presentation skills of the students. Many of the students had already received guidance by the Cain Project in previous classes and it clearly showed in the confidence, knowledge, and skill with which they tackled each presentation. I found that the students already knew how to give great presentations, so I focused on the technical content by teaching the students to assess critically the feasibility of their ideas and be persuasive in marketing these ideas in their presentations. The students in turn taught me that that there are many ways to solve a single problem and that by thinking outside the box, great ideas are easy to find. For me, it was particularly rewarding to watch all these ideas come together for the final presentations. The memories of this fun, intellectually stimulating work is something I will always carry with me and I hope that I will be able to pass on my enthusiasm and new knowledge to next year’s class.

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