My Poor Preparation

so for my class I am taking this semester, we had a presentation about a position paper that we wrote earlier in the semester. It is somewhat mind-boggling to me how different I am in the professional world and the academic world. In the professional world, I think of myself as successful and motivated. However, in the academic world, I have always been a bit of a slacker, simply doing enough to get by and only that much. This reared its ugly head today during this presentation. Last week, I spent a little time putting together the slides for the presentation, but didn't even do a complete read through of the paper, which later proved to be a gigantic mistake.

so i stumbled my way through my slides and then handed it off to my partner who did about the same. we finished up our presentation in like 8 minutes (supposed to be around 15) and then opened up the floor for questions. All questions went something like this, "tell me more about this." My response was generally, "um... I didn't do extensive research into the specifics of how this works, but the general concept is this." Then the teacher asked some questions that we totally misinterpretted and then sat down assuming we just failed the class. That might be a bit of an overstatement because the whole paper (abstract, paper, and presentation) is only worth 20% of our grade, but it could have gone much better. Maybe i should try to start applying some of my work ethic to my school work... or maybe I should just finish school... both options are good ones.