Formula Student
1. Use the Available Resources
We purposefully don’t allow competitors to have access to the marking scheme for the Business Presentation event, but we give plenty of hints as to what it includes via the:
Make sure you’ve read through these and made use of the information these contain – after all, they’re there to help you!
2. Learn to Count
Within the rules there are several numerical limits relating to the Business Presentation, these include:
- Presentations are limited to a maximum of ten (10) minutes.
- Printed material to support your presentation is allowable but must be limited to a maximum of eight (8) sides of A4 paper.
- Teams arriving more than eleven (11) minutes late to their assigned judging team will be deemed to have missed their assigned time period.
Remember, more isn’t always better – the more you exceed these limits, the larger the penalties you’ll receive!
3. Be Prepared
The motto The Scout Association adopted over one hundred years ago is just as relevant to Formula Student (and life in general) today! Make sure you’re prepared on the day of your presentation; this simply means knowing who needs to be where, when and with what equipment/resources. It’s no good spending weeks preparing your presentation if you turn up to your judging session with a laptop that has a flat battery and your charger is at the campsite!
4. Ask Someone Else’s Advice
If you’ve written your team’s business presentation it will make perfect sense to you – but what about other people? Deliver your presentation to someone who’s not been involved with writing it and ask for their feedback – if they don’t understand or have questions there’s a good chance you need to make some changes. If you’re going to do this, I suggest allowing your reviewer to read the available resources first, at least that way they should know what your presentation is supposed to be about.
5. Keep it Simple
We like innovative and novel proposals but think about the objective of the event! A relatively straightforward, well-structured and easy to understand presentation will probably score more marks than trying to persuade the judges you’ve come up with a unique opportunity to reinvent the wheel.
Also think about your slide builds and structure:
- Are they clear?
- Can text be read against the slide background?
- Have you incorporated so much animation that the judges will be distracted?
- Will half of your ten minutes spent watching pictures spiral across the screen?
We have a lot of presentations to judge, so please don’t make them boring, but equally don’t make them so complicated our brains melt!
Nothing here is rocket science, but hopefully following this simple advice will help you prepare and succeed in this year’s Business Presentation event. Good luck!