10 Tips To Nail Your End Review For That PPO

You are just about to wrap up your dream internship, you have worked hard for over 6 weeks. You have learnt a lot and really want to join the organization full time. Your end review is next week, it’s your last chance to make a lasting impression and you really want to show them what you can do, or, maybe your journey so far has been a start-stop one, but you know you can do better and you want to use your final presentation as an opportunity to wow the leadership and show them your true potential. So, what do you need to make a killer presentation? Here we have 10 tips you can use to nail your end review. PS: by presentation, we do not mean just the PPT slides but the whole package that includes delivery.

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10 Tips To Nail Your End Review For That PPO.

1. Create a compelling narrative.

We’re wired to remember stories rather than a random bunch of facts. So spend time first creating a narrative around your internship. It DOES NOT have to be a linear narrative of I did this then this then this. Use this as an opportunity to package your project into as cohesive a journey as possible for the audience.
Remember: Your audience has not spent 2 months thinking of this problem, so a few things obvious to you may not seem obvious to them. Your aim is to make their job of understanding it all easier.

2. Why does your project exist?

No organisation gives a project that has no value addition to their existing work. So, the first thing to answer is “Why does this project exist?”
Spend a short time (maybe a minute) doing this upfront to highlight the importance and your understanding of how the project aligns with the organisation objectives and opportunities. This can be used as your HOOK saying this project lets us open up opportunities worth 100 Cr. in a growing segment and through the next 15 mins I shall show you how. (Wouldn’t that have their attention for the next 15 mins!)

3. Overview slide

Create a single slide summary of your project and present it upfront. Do not put your solution in this slide. Talk about what you did, but more importantly explain how you did those things and why. This slide is to establish your process with the audience, put them at ease about your work methodology and helps the audience understand what the flow of the presentation will be like.

4. Slide structure is important.

Do not clutter your slides with an immense amount of text, graphs, or both. The audience is sitting through many many presentations. It is not their duty to pay attention and decipher your presentation, it is your responsibility to make them understand your work and impact. A few handy tips for this:

a. Always include a single-line summary of the slide at the top or bottom. This is the takeaway from the slide.
b. For any graphs, charts, or images used, clean them up to highlight and call out what is important from them. Blur out unimportant parts of an image if necessary.
c. Use a large font size (nothing less than 18 if you have a time limit and no slide limit)
d. Only use standard fonts that can run on any device.

5. The tone of your presentation

Depending on your project, your personality and the organization culture (something you would have gauges over your internship) add some of your personality to the presentation. If you are a high-energy individual who is comfortable talking feel free to add that touch of flair and humor. Sprinkle a dash of your personality into your work. This is important as it lets the audience connect with you as a person, shows you would fit into the organization. As we said, it’s not only about the slides but the presentation.

6. Animations

Do not go overboard with animations but use animations to control the attention of the audience. This is especially important if you have slides filled with a lot of text and images (Hopefully you don’t, but in some cases, it may be impossible to avoid due to a slide limit, we get it.) Use the animations to control the timing of content becoming visible on screen. If your entire slide appears at the same time then a large portion of the audience will try to start reading and decipher it which means they are not paying attention to what you are saying but what you have written. WE DO NOT WANT THAT. We want their attention at any point to be at what we are saying. By controlling what appears (or disappears) on the screen, we can control the narrative.

7. Use appendix slides and excel sheets to your advantage.

Try to only include the key takeaways and impact of data points on your work in your main slides. The SO WHAT part of the data interpretation. Keep the details like the data itself, calculations, and how you did them in appendix slides or excel sheets readily available to you so you can present if asked.

8. Align your work to the audience.

Talk to Management trainees, managers, buddies whomever you have interacted with during the internship and built a rapport with. Understand the key stakeholders sitting on the review panel and what kind of questions they are prone to ask. Always keep answers for these questions prepared and available in your appendix at least if to doesn’t make sense to add to your main slides.

9. Learnings

This is your opportunity to showcase yourself as an individual rather than an employee. Add work-related learnings but some behavioral learnings as well. Highlight things you have learnt about the organization culture and what learnings of yours align with the organization perspective.
This slide is all about your personality, and your style. Be yourself.

10. Pay attention to details.

Consistent fonts, color themes (if the organization doesn’t already have a format), show all your sources, animation timing, etc. Attention to these details shows your ability to see things through properly.

Our final tip: Practice, Practice, Practice!

Do a full presentation to a few people who have no idea about your project at all (classmates make a good option here) to see what some of the obvious questions are which your presentation does not address. This also makes you more fluid in your presentation and makes you do iterations of your PPT because the first draft is rarely (if ever) perfect. We hope these 10 tips will truly help you nail your end review. Good luck with your internships, enjoy 2nd year of MBA, we hope you get the dream offers you are after!

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