Earlier this month, I was invited by CASE Europe to present a session on International Student Recruitment at the Beyond the Hype seminar. The seminar was led by Pamela Agar, Head of Digital Media and Marketing at Imperial College London and Alison Wildish, Head of Web Services at University of Bath.

These are the slides from the session which I presented:

CASE Europe were kind enough to email me the evaluation of my session. I scored a few 'below average' marks, mostly 'average' marks, a batch of 'v. goods', and a handful of 'excellents' for the following criteria: knowledge of subject matter / topic, presentation skills, and ability to respond appropriately to audience.

Specific comments included:

• A little too vague on the specifics, makes me wonder how much is theory and how much has actually been put into practice. Some hard stats and examples from any successfully completed campaigns would have been illuminating.
• I liked the way he interacted with audience by taking a query from one of the delegates. But I was hoping to see a result e.g. collecting data on recruiting Law Students from China by phone for KCL - would have liked to have seen how Chameleon.net displayed this data as results (or maybe I got the wrong end of the stick?)
• Suraj tried to be interactive but again, because international recruitment isn't necessarily the direct responsibility of those in the audience this was difficult. I think maybe there was too much to be covered in a short space of time.
• Far too little detail left me thinking this was little more than a thinly-veiled advertisement.

As I intend to keep presenting to higher education professionals, I'm really grateful for the feedback offered by delegates so that I can improve my presentation style over time. It's also helped me realise that I need to prepare more useful content to present with the right level of detail.

In response to the first point asking for hard stats, the thing is that the strategy which I presented is still fairly new. However, I will be in a position to deliver examples from successfully completed campaigns in a few months time as a result of the work we are doing with clients at the moment.

There was of course quite a lot to cover in a short space of time, so my presentation was meant to only give a top-level overview. Although I had mentioned this in the introduction, I will now need to ensure that I clearly frame the session appropriately.

I'm concerned that one delegate was left thinking it was little more than a thinly-veiled advertisement, but as my intention is to keep serving the higher education community better over time, I hope what I deliver and what comes across is less about advertising and more about informing (and entertaining).

Anyone reading this thinking you'd be happy to spend 30 minutes with me to become a better public speaker, I'd certainly value your support. Tweet me @surajshah