Lael Wentland
Lael is a bioengineering PhD student and member of the GradSWE leadership team as the local programming liaison.
Starting a presentation from scratch can be intimidating, especially when that presentation is short and for a general audience. You can't use all the same images and words from your academic conferences so where do you start? I wanted to share a few tips I use when creating the content for a general research talk.
1. Determine your audience and your time limit: Try to determine beforehand who you will be speaking to and the format (powerpoint, Prezi, other ?). Knowing your time limit and audience will help guide your outline for your presentation. If I’m feeling stuck, I try to write out the main point for the audience to know. Then I work backwards and draw out a sketch of the slides or make a numbered list for each slide with its intent/message.
2. The background should be longer than you think: You should gauge the amount of background information based on your audience but I’ve found its best to err on the side of providing more.
People want to know your motivation and the problems you are facing. If you present a clear background story for why your research topic is important, your audience will be able to follow your results. I once received a comment during a presentation competition where the reviewer wanted to know the societal impact of my work such as “how many people does the disease affect?”. You can grab your audience by clearly relating your research question to their world.
3. Refrain from too much text: This is a pretty common piece of advice yet I still see many bullet point heavy slides at conferences. I draw inspiration from the PechaKucha style of presenting which only uses images to weave a story. Another source of inspiration is the 3 Minute Thesis, I recommend you check out videos of both!
There will be words in some figures and you may want to edit those legends or labels to be in audience appropriate language. Replacing bullet points with symbols of images also means your audience will be listening to what you say, rather than read what's on the screen.
4. Focus your message: Do not try to cram your four years of research into the presentation, leave that to your dissertation. Since your presentation is mostly background, choose one or two pieces of data that connects to your motivation. If you really need to show graphs, pair them down with limited data and easy to read labels/sample names. While you may only have 1-2 slides of data, take your time to explain what the image shows and why that data/trend is important.
See the previous blog post on how to practice your talk once you have created your presentation. For a less stressful presentation, the content and draft of your script should be finished at least a week before your present. Leave some time for practice.
How do you start preparing a presentation? Do you write an outline? Do you use animations? Comment below to share your approach for creating the content of your presentations.
1. Determine your audience and your time limit: Try to determine beforehand who you will be speaking to and the format (powerpoint, Prezi, other ?). Knowing your time limit and audience will help guide your outline for your presentation. If I’m feeling stuck, I try to write out the main point for the audience to know. Then I work backwards and draw out a sketch of the slides or make a numbered list for each slide with its intent/message.
2. The background should be longer than you think: You should gauge the amount of background information based on your audience but I’ve found its best to err on the side of providing more.
People want to know your motivation and the problems you are facing. If you present a clear background story for why your research topic is important, your audience will be able to follow your results. I once received a comment during a presentation competition where the reviewer wanted to know the societal impact of my work such as “how many people does the disease affect?”. You can grab your audience by clearly relating your research question to their world.
3. Refrain from too much text: This is a pretty common piece of advice yet I still see many bullet point heavy slides at conferences. I draw inspiration from the PechaKucha style of presenting which only uses images to weave a story. Another source of inspiration is the 3 Minute Thesis, I recommend you check out videos of both!
There will be words in some figures and you may want to edit those legends or labels to be in audience appropriate language. Replacing bullet points with symbols of images also means your audience will be listening to what you say, rather than read what's on the screen.
4. Focus your message: Do not try to cram your four years of research into the presentation, leave that to your dissertation. Since your presentation is mostly background, choose one or two pieces of data that connects to your motivation. If you really need to show graphs, pair them down with limited data and easy to read labels/sample names. While you may only have 1-2 slides of data, take your time to explain what the image shows and why that data/trend is important.
See the previous blog post on how to practice your talk once you have created your presentation. For a less stressful presentation, the content and draft of your script should be finished at least a week before your present. Leave some time for practice.
How do you start preparing a presentation? Do you write an outline? Do you use animations? Comment below to share your approach for creating the content of your presentations.
