The 2011 English Presentation Contest Finals was held on April 27 at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences Auditorium. The Finals was open to the public and there was a large crowd consisting of both participants and their acquaintances this year.

The English Presentation Contest was first held in 2000 and is annually run by the Language Center and financially supported by the General Affairs Team. The entries are open to KAIST students and 2011 Spring KAIST Language Center students, and each participating team must consist of one or two individuals. This year the participants were given a choice to talk about any of the following keywords; “KAIST,” “To Build the Science Area,” “Travel,” “Social Network,” “Multi-Cultural Family” and “Atomic Nuclear”.

The competition is split into two stages; the preliminaries and the finals. For the preliminaries, anyone who meets the participation criteria can submit a recording file of an abstract of their presentation along with the application form online. Then the application is processed and five judges score the entrants. In accordance with the scores, ten teams are selected for the finals and these chosen teams are contacted individually.

In the finals, the participants make seven- to eight-minute presentations using any visual materials of their choice, such as Powerpoints. These presentations are once again scored by the judges and prizes are given to the teams who presented best. First place received the grand prize of 500,000 Korean Won, while two other teams received 200,000 Korean Won for the excellence award and another two teams received 100,000 Korean Won for the participation award.

This year 25 teams entered the competition and ten made it to the finals. The winning team of two students, Inseong You and Eun Hea Cho, presented about “Dearest Kaistians, We have engineering problems!” The excellence award was given to “Travel to find the dream” by Gunwoo Park and Jiin Seo and “Social Network: TGIF, Pros & Cons” by Changjoo Lee. The participation award went to “California Dreaming” by Sujeong Park and Seung won Jeon and “Happier KAISTians” by Daehee Hwang. In addition to the contest presentations, there was a short lecture by Professor Mik Fanguy about giving presentations. There was also pizza and donuts provided for the audience.

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