From Stumble To Almost Flawless
Spring 2026
This term I took Professional Development Workshop (MBA 6281) with Professor Lori Kendall, a Tuesday-night, in-person course built entirely around public speaking. No case studies, no spreadsheets. Just you, a room full of classmates, and a growing pile of feedback on how you sound and look while talking.
Let me set expectations up front: I am not a strong public presenter. Public speaking has never come naturally to me, and I don’t think the goal of this class was ever to turn me into one. If anything, the honest goal was smaller and more achievable: to hate it a little less by the end than I did at the start.
The course description promises that “in each of you is a potential great TED talk,” which felt like a stretch in week one and, honestly, still felt like a stretch by week three. I signed up for two reasons: I wanted more reps presenting in front of a live audience, and I wanted to actually do something about my stage fright instead of just avoiding it. Working fully remote and heads-down in code most days, I don’t exactly get a lot of practice standing up and talking to a room.
The Rocky Start
I’ll be honest: I did not stick the landing on one of our early presentations. I got a few sentences in, lost the thread, and started stuttering, rolling through the same sentence again and again trying to find my way back into it, and only digging the hole deeper each time I restarted it.
It got rough enough that Professor Kendall actually stopped me mid-presentation. Her exact words: “I could let Aravind here keep blabbering and struggling on, but let’s pause and have a deep breath.” She then opened the floor and had the rest of the class give me tips and pointers on the spot before I started over from the beginning. The second go-around went a lot better.
As deflating as that moment was in the room, it was probably the best thing that could have happened that early in the semester. It forced me to actually engage with the feedback instead of coasting on “I’m probably fine at this.”
That early wobble became the baseline I spent the rest of the term trying to beat.
Finding a Groove
The turning point was less a single moment and more a pattern that showed up across every speech after that: I was consistently strong on structure and message, and consistently working on delivery.
By the time I did my individual persuasive speech (pitching a marketing budget increase for a fictional AI product launch), the feedback from classmates Grey and Dylan captured the split perfectly. Grey said the talk was “well structured and easy to follow” and that I “commanded” the room. Dylan’s notes were the more useful ones, though: more hand gestures, less staring at the screen like it owed me money, more pauses to let a point land instead of rushing to the next one.
Writing the reflection afterward, I described my own delivery as feeling like a plane taking off: a little bumpy on the runway, smoother once I actually got moving. That image stuck with me for the rest of the semester. My fix wasn’t to eliminate the bumpy start; it was to get airborne faster.
The Finale: Chaos Theory, Muppet Edition
For our final group presentation, my team (Molly Kuchan, Noah Zona, and I) pitched a theory of high-performing teams built entirely around the Muppets. The core idea: the teams that look “aligned, efficient, drama-free, and logical” from the outside are usually the ones quietly suppressing the personalities that would have made them better. The best teams don’t eliminate chaos, they give it a role.
We mapped that onto the cast:
| Muppet | Workplace role | What they bring |
|---|---|---|
| Kermit | Team lead / PM | Holds it together, barely; project manager by title, therapist by necessity |
| Gonzo | Creative / idea generator | 90% chaos, 10% genius; you need both |
| Statler & Waldorf | Skeptics / analysts | Annoying, necessary; challenge reduces risk, silence increases it |
| Animal | High-energy executor | Might burn out, but carries the sprint |
| Miss Piggy | Top performer | Demanding, but raises the bar for everyone |
The punchline: same cast, different outcome, depending on whether a team suppresses those personalities or assigns them a role.
The Feedback
Professor Kendall’s notes on the final presentation, in full:
Totally loved this! Just a few hitches in what was otherwise a flawless presentation! Noah, just a couple of filler words! Aravind, you lost your train of thought and had a filler word. That’s it. Otherwise, totally flawless!
I keep coming back to how far that is from where I started. The person who badly fumbled one of the early presentations turned into “one filler word and a brief lost train of thought” by the end of the term, in what the professor otherwise called flawless.
Looking Back
If there’s a single lesson from this class, it’s that the stumble at the beginning wasn’t a sign I was bad at this; it was just the first data point. Structure and message came naturally to me from the start; the delivery (gestures, eye contact, pacing, actually landing a joke about a Muppet without losing my thread) took the whole semester of reps to build. I’ll take a flawless-minus-one-filler-word Muppets presentation as a pretty good place to land.