How to Survive the French Exposé

The French exposé is the French equivalent of the American "final presentation." It's the unnecessarily large and stressful project that every student dreads until the second it is over. The presentation is out loud, in front of the entire class and the professor and is supposed to last somewhere between 10 and 15 min. It requires a lot of preparation, a lot of research, and will make you feel like you're losing your mind. Hoping to avoid that, here are my helpful hint on how to survive your French exposés.

1) Try not to stress. Just like all the final projects in America, they're never as bad as they seem when you're in the thick of it. Just take a breath and keep going at it.

2) Break it up. Staring at the mountain of work that needs to be done at the beginning is enough to make you want to crawl into a hole and hide. Look for ways to split up the work. Start by reading what needs to be read and watching what needs to be watched, then try tackling more.

3) Make sure that you are interested in the topic that you’re doing your exposé on. There is nothing more difficult than trying to pull together a long presentation on a subject that you aren’t even interested in. If you have the littlest bit interested in what your topic is, then you can find a foothold to get yourself going.

4) It can be very helpful to work with a partner, but if they are not good at communicating, they slack the work off onto you, or they don’t seem to understand the subject, it can be better to work alone. It can be scary to try to tackle the 10-15 min all by yourself. But if the other person is going to end up holding you back, then why put yourself through that?

Finally, my last, biggest, and most important hint for surviving your French exposés: for the love of everything good in the world, do NOT schedule all your exposés for the same two weeks. You will get overwhelmed and you will cry.

That's all I can really say for now as I have a LOT of work to do. Allons-y!

Update: I was too busy working on my multiple exposés to get this posted before I actually presented them. However, everything went really well for me. Two of the three grades I’ve gotten back are very good and I have high hopes for the last one. I am not completely finished with my exposés, but I do have a week or so break before I need to do my next one. That being the case, I am finally able to take a second to breathe and finally get this blog posted. I really hope that now I have these projects out of the way I will be able to relax a little bit more and enjoy myself without the stress.

Now it’s time to keep working! Allons-y!