I am just coming from the UNIL where I gave a presentation at the Forum Horizon 2009 about the day-to-day work of a computer science engineer. The Forum Horizon is organized by the Office cantonal d’orientation scolaire et professionnelle in order to present the different possibilities of jobs to second year gymnasium students, from the air controller to the scentific police.
It is the 6th year in a row I present this topic and this year I decided to change radically the format of the presentation. Rather than having a bunch of slide with bullet points, I took the option of have big pictures on the background and very few words highlighting the subject. At then end, it was not easy to fing the correct pictures to illustrate the slides, but I think I have been quite successful. The most difficult is to understand what the audience want to know. The goal is to be non-technical and to try to explain clearly what we do as an engineer (and software architect). Moreover, the people in the room still don’t know what they want to do. The idea is to help them to make their choice and not necessarily to make them selecting this job.
I posted the presentation here.