Final Portfolio

Nov 19

Cover Letter

Set Reminder: To be read on December 1st 2025
Subject: Where You Were Last Year

Dear Future Matt,

A year ago, you had just finished the class Designing Effective Presentations, where you created three artifacts. You recorded an introductory video designed as an ice-breaker to your fellow students, pitched an idea for change to BritBox, and created a narrated presentation reflecting on the benefits of joining a club at Penn. Along the way you examined your presentation styles in front of and behind the camera. You listened harder to what you sound like on the internet, and looked closer at your slides. You became more rigorous about cadence and got crisp about making the right points simpler and earlier. You discovered Robert Putnam and connected his work to your own academic journey of being a joiner. You got inspired by Tufte and Duarte, although you decided to side with neither in favor of orienting your presentations not around complexity or simplicity, but around context. And in focusing on your audience, and the selflessness which comes from craffting your presentations around their needs over your own, you built a framework upon which to put those learnings into practice at work.

But the work in class didn’t just recalibrate and reorient how you present. It pointed out redundancies and drew attention to repetition and hesitation. It drew attention to those places where a lack of confidence in the material caused gaps in your speech. And it highlighted all those umms, breaths and mispronunciations which cause an audience to lose interest. By putting your presentations under a microscope, you were able to see them anew. It motivated a project of going back and watching previous presentations, pulling them apart and seeing the patterns of delivery across them which you still need to change. It held an often uncomfortable mirror up to who you are in front of others. But most importantly, it gave you a place from which to grow.

And that’s what you’ve done over the past year. You graduated from Penn in Spring 2025, in one of the proudest moments of your life. And you take from Penn everything you learned from each class, leaving to become what all Penn graduates become, an explosion of change in the world. The presentation class was only the end of the beginning, and since then you’ve spoken publicly with more confidence, more rigor, more preparedness, and more enjoyment. You’ve learned to relax into a confident delivery rather than drive toward a deadline. You’ve learned to say and show more with less. You’ve become more at ease with what you look like on camera, and have accepted what you sound like online. You’ve created a body of presentations which build upon your learnings from Penn, are able to transfer insights to others around you, and presented a number of impactful experiences of which you can be proud.

You did it.
Matt, Fall 2024

Revised Presentation

Revised Presentation Notes:

Removed the slide featuring the Penn Moviegoer homepages (this point was redundant as I had already showed the stories I wrote)
Focused more on the stronger ‘close’ of what virtual students can do to give back to other undergraduate students by bringing their life experiences of being returning students into the clubs and helping those for whom this is their first undergraduate experience
Extended the presentation by one minute in order to deliver a more relaxed presentation and give the closing points more space
Spent less time explaining who I am in order to get into the substance of what I did
Spent less time on Robert Putnam’s inspiration for the presentation and more about what he represents to me
Created a transcript for use with accessibility considerations, added the transcript as a description to my YouTube upload
Enabled subtitle accessibility / closed captions support for my video in YouTube
As a result of these adjustments, overall the presentation feels more natural, more confident, and stronger in its message of being a joiner

Accessibility Transcript:
Hi everybody. I'm Matt Shadbolt, and today I'm going to talk to you about why you should join a club as an online undergraduate at Penn.

I'm currently a senior in the Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences program at Penn, and I'm majoring in literature, culture and tradition, and I'm going to graduate in the spring of 2025. By day, I'm the Head of Product at the NBC News Group, and I'm also a husband and the father of a teenage daughter, all of which makes for a very busy life. But most importantly, I'm a lifelong learner who decided to use the opportunity of the pandemic to go back to school.

But really I’m like this guy. This is Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. He's a very famous political scientist, and he is the subject of a Netflix documentary called Join or Die, which is about the benefits of joining clubs, both for civic engagement, for the democratic and diplomatic process, but also for personal wellbeing. And he is a very large advocate for the benefits of joining clubs and civic and community engagement. He advocates for being a joiner, which is what I became at Penn.

So let's talk a little bit about what I did. Well, I joined the Penn Moviegoer, which is Penn's Film and Television criticism club, and I wrote for them for four years. I also joined their board of directors and became their design chair for three years. I designed the Penn Democrats website, and I spoke at a number of in-person club events for the Daily Pennsylvanian the Penn Dems and Product Space, which is Penn’s product management club. I got interviewed for 34th Street and submitted work to writing competitions, and I even threw toast at a Penn Quaker football game. But the short of this is that I got involved adjacent to my academic experience of being in online classes, and made the virtual into something real and physical as part of my academic experience.

These are some examples of the kinds of articles that I wrote for the for the Penn Moviegoer. I wrote over 50 for them. These are some screenshots of the website I designed with the University of Pennsylvania Democrats Society. And then here are some examples of getting involved in person, both for dinners with the Penn Moviegoer board, but also presentations to the Penn Democrats, to the Daily Pennsylvanian and even going to Franklin Field and getting involved with Quaker football.

So let's talk about the benefits of what I found. I found that joining clubs at Penn created opportunity beyond the classroom. It created space for me to be published independently of my academic work. It allowed me to connect with a diverse community of students. It gave me enough practice to put those learnings into the world and become a more effective writer and speaker, all around creating a large body of new creative work, which I was able to gather together and submit for publications and ultimately get published. It deeply enriched my communal academic experience, and it made me a stronger, more confident leader at work, really by creating opportunities to put these learnings into practice, and it created space for me to give back to others. It put me in situations where I was able to give back to other undergraduate students and answer the questions I wish I had asked myself 30 years ago.

So let's talk a little bit about what you can do. You can find your people on pennclubs.com and proactively reach out to club board members. Many clubs at Penn look for enrollment and recruitment windows and have very specific processes and interviews for being accepted into the club. So understanding the schedule of participation, for example, for The Penn Moviegoer where they meet once a week online, but they also expect you to write something once a month. Reach out to the board members and ask if they accept online or virtual students. But most importantly is to offer to help where you see an unmet need. Many of the people you will meet and encounter in the clubs are first time undergraduates, and some of the benefits of being a virtual or online student is that many of us are returning students. We've had careers or are deep into our careers, or have become parents and have otherwise had lives after our first experience of being an undergraduate. There are incredible opportunities to leverage this expertise for those who have not had those life experiences yet, that is one of the most important valuable things that the virtual student can bring through clubs to others as part of the Penn experience. So my message to you today is, be a joiner just like Robert Putnam, and get involved.

The Impact Upon Me As A Presenter

Hi everyone,

So while I greatly enjoyed pitching the BritBox Team the changes I’d like to see in their EastEnders soap opera user experience, I was even more impacted by the narrated powerpoint assignment, which allowed me to not just reflect upon my style of presentation, but also my time over the past four years at Penn. As a senior who graduates in the Spring, I’m in a naturally more reflective mood these days, but crafting the presentation asked me to really look at what had happened for the first time. What was it I’d done? What had I really learned? What might I be able to pass along to others?

So in the process of building the presentation, it began to be a very interwoven set of ideas whereby the process itself became a reflection of learning, as much as part of the learning inside of the final assignment of a specific class. I was crafting a response to an assignment, but I was also distilling a large number of memories of my time at Penn and asking myself what happens next? It was only by doing this that I was able to use the presentation as a tool to help me understand just what the benefits of advocating for joining clubs was for me, and by serendipitous fortune, it was the same day I discovered Robert Putnam’s work on advocacy for civic engagement via the incredible Netflix documentary Join or Die, which I highly recommend. Putnam spends a lot of time explaining the health benefits of communal activity, and my presentation serves as a reminder to me of exactly that thought, especially the confidence I hear in my voice with the revised version. Being a joiner at Penn has been beneficial to me psychologically, but also professionally. And now I have a living document in PowerPoint form to remind me. I’ve printed out all the slides and pinned them to my wall at work as a reminder to myself.

Combined, Putnam’s work, my own moments of reflection, and the timing of the assignment made for the opportunity to create a crisp and confident set of ten slides over five minutes where I advocated not just for joining, but for giving back. And that’s what I think the best presentations always do. It’s what Doug Tallamy asks of us in Planting Forward. It’s the infectious passion Nicole Steinbok shares with us. What Charity Water does in appealing to our moral conscience. They show us something new about the world, and ask us to go out and be that change for others.