Back in July, I gave a fifteen minute talk about the LSST Camera at a local bar as part of an astronomy on tap event, which in Chile they call Astro Chela. It was a bit intimidating considering that ~60 people showed up and it was my first public talk in spanish, but I think it turned out sufficiently well. Or at least, the beer helped people respond well to my questionable jokes.

A friend of a friend learned about the event and asked if I’d be willing to give a presentation in a local school. Of course I said yes, assuming it would be a classroom of 30 ish middle school students. Easy enough. 

Somehow wires got crossed because what I had unknowingly agreed to was a presentation to a group of 50 students, 11th and 12th graders, in a school an hour and a half away from La Serena. And they gave me a 90 minute block of time. I had never done a long presentation like that in english, let alone spanish. Oh, and I found all of this out 48 hours before the presentation was scheduled to take place. Chile really does feel like a country of Hamishes sometimes.

After calming down from a minor freakout, I spent some time with Will on the phone brainstorming how to entertain 17 and 18-year-olds for an hour and a half when my existing presentation content in spanish is only fifteen minutes long and meant to be given in a bar to tipsy adults. The answer was threefold: add an introduction about what engineering is and how I became an engineer, talk about the observatory and the telescope in addition to the camera, and add in a hands-on engineering challenge at the end. I finished my slides and notes at 2am and called it a night.

Overall, I think the presentation itself went relatively well. If any of the students fell asleep it wasn’t particularly obvious, and I got some giggles at the intentionally silly parts of the talk so at least some of them were still listening at 45 minutes in. The person that organized the talk had attended the school 20-ish years prior, and he said that students usually walk out of boring presentations after twenty minutes so the fact that everyone stayed for the full hour of me talking was impressive. I have a feeling times have changed and the students were required to stay, but I’ll take the compliment regardless.

For the last half hour, the students worked in groups with limited materials (10 sheets of paper, 20 cm of masking tape) to build the tallest tower possible that could support a can of peaches since they conveniently happened to be on sale that morning when I went to find a weight at the grocery store. At this point some students did leave, but a solid portion of them stayed to try the challenge when I bribed the winners with candy. I am definitely not above providing extra motivation for participation.

I posted about the talk on instagram and yet another acquaintance reached out to ask if I would be willing to give a presentation in the school he teaches at. I first confirmed it would actually be in La Serena this time, and now that’s supposed to happen when I’m back in Chile next week. So that’s what I get for publicly posting about the talk I gave.

Wish me luck!