A Flock Without a Head

I have been hounding the two international students Haryo and Tao about their international communication presentations. The professor was too busy and too tired to follow them around. Tao had just had a horrible horrible presentation at the joint seminar last Wednesday. I think by far that was the worst presentation ever conducted by a member of this laboratory. He completely read from the long paragraphs he had written on the powerpoint slides. In fact he couldn't even read the paragraphs in English properly and struggled with a lot of sentences. It was heartbreaking to see a presentation like this. Tao was grilled by the professor and he tried to explain things he did not understand.

When he entered last year as a research student he was supposed to follow Nishitani-san and learn from his research, he didn't do that. After the graduation of the old M2, he was then supposed to follow Yazu-san on his research, he didn't do it, either. This year he expressed interests in joining the dye-sensitized solar cell group. There are currently only 2 members in this group. Ohgai-san is graduating in April and I will soon follow in October. There was no question in my mind that he will not be able to graduate if he continues our DSSC research in this lab with that kind of analytical skill. He is still just a child. Because he suddenly wanted to switch to this topic, Waki-sensei had to assign him a topic, a topic that combines Ohgai-san's topic and my topic. It was just for the sake of that presentation. Then he decided to add one more material into this topic. So at the joint seminar I asked him, "Why did you choose that material?" He said, "Just I read this in a paper, I still need to study.", completely unacceptable. He was devastated after the presentation, acting like a sad puppy. He asked me if I could talk to him about his presentation later on that day. I agreed. I had my notes ready.

Later one that day, I kept going to his room, seeing if he had returned from class or not. Finally he came back late in a rush saying that his professor from the class asked him if he was available for a meal at 3pm. I said, "Oh that's fine. I'll be here after you finish your lunch." That day I waited until 6pm and still no sign of him. I left the lab, a little bit frustrated. The next day I grabbed him after his class to talk to him about his presentation. We went through each slides telling him what he said wrong on and what he didn't say. I gave him a deadline that he must finish all the slides by the end of this week. So we'll have time to practice his weakest point, speech. He bargained with me, saying that as long as he finishes the slides by Monday. He will be okay. I agreed.

On Monday, the attack of Matsun started once again on Waki-sensei. He attacked her on allowing the M2 graduating students to use certain gas on a Saturday night. He attitude was extremely bad and a few of the students wanted to jump in and shut him up from using that kind of tone towards our professor. It was also from those days he started sending attack emails. Waki-sensei took those accusations and scolded him back, exercising special exemption because M2 is graduating in a week and they needed those equipments. The whole day the students were talking about the incidents. Tao still did not finish his powerpoint slides. I was getting a bit irritated.

On Tuesday, I heard that he has moved places to the 6th floor lunch room. So I grabbed my books and went there to sit with him, wanted to periodically to check his progress. On the other hand, he had been working on his assignments all night. At around 10pm, he finally started working on the slides, so I told him how the format of his abstract should be and answered some of his quesitons. At 11pm I had to go back home. He asked me when I would arrive in the morning. We set the time at 9am where I would go over his presentation.

On Wednesday, I waited in the room and eventually had to join the Wednesday morning seminar. He arrived at 10am, late. From 9am to 10am I have already edited Haryo's powerpoint slide. It was very well made and I asked him some specific questions to alert him about the possible scenarios. At 12noon, I was about to go back to the lab and get ready for my Japanese test later that day. Tao stopped me and asked if I could walk with him to the cafe. I told him I am going back to eat, if he needed me to edit his powerpoint, he should give them to me right at that moment.

I came back to the room with the 3 pages in my hand. The powerpoint was worse than the ones from last week. There was no way for me to correct them anymore. The abstract was written with so little content, exactly the opposite that I had told him a few days ago. There was no turning back. When he finally came back to the room, I told him all the things that were wrong. I didn't scold him. I said, when the question period comes, you need to be prepared to answer the most basic question one would ask. "How do you propose to make that?" "Why did you choose that material?" He said, "Okay, I have that paper, I will memorize it."

At 1:15pm, I went to the presentation hall. I had already been here twice for my past 2 presentations last year. I had more experience than anybody in those room about the proceedings, including the professors. Because I knew the real bad part would come from the Q&A and I can't just ask Tao questions. It would seem like planting questions. I asked questions for every single presentations. For the first time I felt that I was no longer an inexperienced student in this school anymore. I knew all their researches and was able to critique on the content. The room was again so dead quiet so I became the only one asking questions until the Q&A period came up.

Haryo's presentation when without a problem, I even asked him a very difficult question which he was able to answer with details. When it was Tao's turn, my heart was torn apart. He struggled to read from his powerpoint. It was clear that he didn't not prepare for this presentation and sometimes it would take him 4, 5 tries to read one sentence right. The professor looked a bit embarrassed since she was the chairperson for those 2 presentations. I asked him the question that I had asked him earlier, "How do you think you will prepare the key layer of his design?" He gave me a very surprised look. He said that he will look at some paper and figure out how to do it. I was a bit upset. I then counter him on why he chose to use the material, since it's the only thing that set our reseraches apart. He couldn't answer that one either. The professor finally stepped in and commented, "You need to study your material more" The presentation ended abruptly, when the crowd didn't produce anymore questions. I thought I was a bit rough on him, but I'd rather grill him myself then have someone else grill him.

The professor looked really tired after the presentation, coughing at times. She didn't even have the energy to be mad at Tao. The next morning, she was admitted into the hospital. The following day, the second year students are to finish their thesis, but the professor was not available to check. Instead, the student on leave of illness in Saitama went online and went through all 3 thesis with the second years.