Developing Your PowerPoint Presentation: Part One, Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation
Bowling Together: The Benefits of Joining a Club as an Online Undergraduate at Penn
5-Minute Powerpoint Presentation: Rhetorical Outline
Proposition:
I intend to prove the value of community engagement and joining a club to online undergraduate students at Penn
Audience:
Primary: Existing online and virtual undergraduate students at Penn, especially those who may never have considered or thought possible the opportunity of joining one of Penn’s hundreds of clubs. These students may have physical access to Penn’s campus, but most will not. They may simply be too far away, or have a host of other access challenges. Many of these students may not even know these opportunities are possible, which clubs exist, or the process of application.
Secondary: I also want my proposition to address the administrative and admissions undergraduate faculty at Penn in demonstrating the benefits of engaging with other students for those who might otherwise be isolated or restricted to collaborative assignments in their academic studies.
I want both audiences to understand that what happens at Penn is so much more than what happens in the classroom, and that the enrichment of joining deepens and strengthens the online academic experience.
Exigence:
To both audiences, I want to express the diverse elements of my own experiences with Penn clubs.
The presentation is proactive and unprompted, but motivated by a desire to share the benefits I experienced with others. Those who might look to join a club, but also those who might help raise awareness of such benefits to incoming virtual students.
I wrote for The Penn Moviegoer for four years but also became a board member and ran their website.
I designed PennDems.org and worked closely with Penn’s Democratic Club in their efforts to leverage their site for civic engagement.
I’ve spoken in person at several club events on campus, including for the Product Management club, Penn Dems, and The Daily Pennsylvanian.
I’ve thrown toast at a Quakers game, been interviewed for Under The Button, and attended speaker events at Irvine.
In short, I have been a joiner, and as my experience at Penn draws to a close early next year, my involvement with the clubs and events, both physical and virtual, has immeasurably enriched my experience of going back to school.
Motivation of Speaker:
Last year, I watched the Netflix documentary Join or Die on the work of political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. The film resonated deeply with me, especially Putnam’s work on social connectedness and social capital, and how we might think differently about the enrichment of community through interaction with others. Putnam’s work is largely concerned with declines in American civic engagement, but I believe his work is highly applicable to the case for being a joiner at Penn. He argues that we have to imagine being together differently, and that there are clear health and wellbeing benefits to being part of something bigger than oneself. My own experience at Penn has closely mirrored these benefits, and my goal is to encourage others to see the opportunity to feel them too.
Motivation of Audience:
This presentation is proactive and unprompted, but it attempts to leverage and spotlight a gap in awareness for undergraduate virtual students. In listening to the presentation, we hope that the student would understand the extracurricular enrichment opportunities which exist everywhere at Penn, but that the admissions administration will also understand and be able to act upon these benefits for recruitment and retention efforts. The presentation helps to add real-world experiential talking points to the question ‘Why Penn?’
Location:
My location will need to match that of my audience, and be held virtually. Penn admissions regularly holds information sessions as livestreams on YouTube, and this five-minute presentation might exist within one of those for general information about the admissions process. This allows me to work proactively with the desired audience of the admissions administration, but also reach the other audience of potential students. It’s a location and format where I can reach both audiences at the same time. It would be presented via a virtual video livestream which would have me speak to several slides and then potentially take questions from the audience.
Video Presentation:
Further to the livestream itself, the presentation would exist on-demand on Penn’s YouTube channel, but also have the utility of being able to be used in communications or embedded on websites or social media.
Rhetorical Strategies for Presentation:
I will need to explain who I am and why I am doing this.
It is imperative that I make my presentation approachable, informal, and with clearly, crisply articulated benefits of being a joiner.
My tone needs to leverage the benefits of my personal experience, but also provide tactical, practical advice for what to do and how it works.
I will need to connect the dots between academic work and club membership as being part of the same shared holistic Penn experience.
My call to action should include resources for how to get started (for example Penn’s clubs website), but also answer questions students may have.
