How Not to Do a Seminar

Here was this company at our institute to talk about ERP, the enterprise resource planning, technology to the students and memebers of the faculty. The standard way of doing it is the sales presentation to show off how you could do a lot of things with the software and try to relate them to the way your prospective customers could solve problems in their life. But, there would not be much in it for students who would like to understand what it is all about, the structure of the software in terms of software architecture terms and so on.

They were so used to the standard approach that despite actually being told how to structure the talk, they still came up with the standard sales pitch. No wonder, students started slipping away. While we started with 60 odd guys in theseminar we ended up with just about half a dozen by the time we finished! Who can blame them! If I was not the host, I would have too.