Kacie's brother, Eric, and I have something in common: we are computer people. We deal with computers all the time. He's a systems administrator, I'm a computer scientist. These are both fields that have titles that aren't self explanatory.
He and I both take a little flak from the women in our lives for being a little anti social (and not having much of a tan). Whenever this happens, we go through a lot of effort to explain to them that when compared to a lot of the people in our fields we are actually quite social. The fact that we have women in our lives should speak to that. I may not be the sharpest programmer in the world, or the most experienced, but I like to think for whatever I lack in pure geek intellect, I make up for by maintaining contact with the rest of the world.
That was what I played upon to give my senior presentation. My project was about something very abstract (Hijacking BGP route information using the longest prefix match principle of route selection, technically). The head of the honors program was introducing us and commented that it would be easiest to let me read the title of my project. I had to give two presentations, one that was more technical to a board of professors and one that was less technical to everyone else. For the second one, my goal was to explain the ideas in a way that any average person could understand it, including my grandmother (My grandmother is a brilliant lady, just not into computers or the internet. She does text though!)
Overall I would say that it went well! There were a couple of times I knew I was glossing over details about the project that I should have gone into more, but I had a number of people comment that they understood what my project was about and the basic concepts it operated on.
Success! It was really nice to hear. I would like to think that 3.5 years of tutoring computer science concepts aided in this process.
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