His main course was my head.

Do you remember that time you spent 48 hours straight working your ass off for what was going to be the best project of your life, only to get your head chopped off and served to as the main course? I do.

When asked to write about a moment in a job that I could not forget, this is mine. My job right now is school. That’s what I do on a daily basis, Monday to Friday. Sure, I don’t get paid to go to class and spend five hours a day, seven days a week doing homework, but I do get to advance my status within the world and someday get paid enough to afford my dreams.

So, this one time at band camp. Okay, just joking. This one time in my Not-For-Profit class my professor assigned a project that involved creating our own Not-For-Profit, environmentally friendly business. I was so excited. I mean, I come up with ideas like Oprah Winfrey gives away money to charities.

My class partner and I met right away; I wanted to get down to business. We came up with this great idea about an energy efficient bus, that the city would buy and transport volunteers to their volunteer destination. We created a Gantt Chart and mapped out strict deadlines for ourselves. We’d meet every week and have the project finished four days ahead of time. We figured this would give us time to make serious edits and polish it off with gold dust.

Our professor decided that it would be a great idea if she invited a panel of business and environmental experts to our class, to judge our businesses and presentations. She had done this with her class last year, and thought it gave realistic insights to how businesses are developed and judged. Yeah, I found out how they were judged alright. Pretty sure I wanted to jump off the school roof after my presentation.

Earlier on in the week, I asked around about what last’s year’s presentations were like. The soon-to-be graduates, who had taken the class, told me about the horrifying judge who basically burned their self-esteem alive with his fire breathing criticism. Was I scared? Not really. I’m not a big believer in fear. I seem to lack it all together. I wasn’t scared; I had confidence in our little “happy feet” bus.

The day came for the presentation. My partner and I were ready. We tested our PowerPoint presentation ahead of time, had a printed and electronic copy to give to our professor and looked our “Sundays’ best” (to be honest I never really look the best on Sundays).

We didn’t go first. We didn’t go second. We went third. We went to the front of the room, fired up our project and began presenting. I closely watched the judges’ eyes and body movements. It didn’t look that bad and thought that maybe we had done a superb job. I mean, I only had about three hours sleep each night, working on this project like a Richard Simmons workout.

The presentation came to an end and the commentary started. The first judge threw a comment at us, like a knife in our leg- you can survive a knife in your leg. He claimed we didn’t have a solid basis for our market. The second judge gave us a black eye. She claimed the city could never afford an environmentally friendly bus for one purpose only. The last judge ripped out our eyes, chopped off our legs and fed them to our classmates. Swear to god, he even marinated them. He started with, “This is impossible, how you could ever think this could ever exist,” and ended it with, “This is ridiculous, I can’t even believe someone would think this would work. Sorry, but there is no way I’d ever give you two a chance at creating a business like this.” I think he may have eaten my heart for desert, when he was finished with my head.

I stood their. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Thank you for your feed back.” What else could I say? They were right. Had we really thought this through in realistic terms? No. Did we give a solid presentation? No. Could we have been more specific and accurate? Yes.

Lessons learned: Think more in-depth about the accuracy of a project. Provide handouts for those to whom you are presenting and question every idea you have. Ask yourself, “does this work today? Could this work tomorrow? Will this work in ten years?”

I learned a lot about how I handle situations and most importantly, how I evaluate my work. I didn’t jump off the school roof that day, but I did learn to think more critically.