How to Give a Research Presentation

Preparing for and organizing the talk

• Define one or two key take home messages that you want to audience to have:
  • This helps you focus on what is important
  • Your audience in general can only remember a couple of things and the rest will tend to be a blur
  • It helps you provide structure
• Make an outline for the talk and submit it to me, or your advisor at least two weeks before the talk.
• Practice it in front of peers
• Don’t be defensive about criticism

A good talk must tell a story.

• Provide a context- why is this important, why should the audience care!
• Define the question that must be answered
• Explain simple terms how you answered the questions
• Present the data
• Draw conclusions
• Provide context

Some people don’t like this but I like to present an outline slide to people get the big picture right up front.

Know your audience

• Having an understanding of what they know AND what they DON’T know
• Think about the first year students and make sure that when you use jargon or new concepts that you spend the time to explain them clearly
  • Most of the audience is students and NOT faculty the talk should be geared towards EDUCATING the student and NOT impressing the faculty.
  • If you don’t explain it assume they won’t understand it

What to Include and NOT Include

• DO NOT fall into the trap of filling time with loads of results
  • The audience doesn’t care how much time you put into getting a result, they care how important it is
  • Always indicate the significance of the results
  • Always show how they fit together with the rest of the

Striking a Balance

• LESS is more-
• Most review talks are not comprehensive reviews but rather a selective review
• Most research talks should NOT be a comprehensive list of all experiments you do
• Your reading should be extremely comprehensive but when you put the talk together pick and choose carefully what you want to present
• Ask yourself if I leave this out will people still understand the talk- if yes then leave it out
• Applies to word, slides, etc

Basic Procedures

• Plan on using about 0.7 slides per minute of talk.
• As you get more experienced you can use more particularly if the slides are of relatively low information content
• 20-25% of time should introduction for those have never seen anything about the field
• Define terms-minimize abbreviations
• If you use abbreviations or reagents know what they are and how they work.
• Avoid jargon, group slang.
• If your talk has parts think about have several summary slides one for each part.

About slides

• First concentrate on content
  • For each slide define the key take home message.
  • Think about how one slide leads into the next slide
• Then concentrate on artistry; a beautiful presentation that says nothing is of little value.
  • Make sure that color choices, fonts and graphics are readily readable from back of room
  • Avoid gratuitous animation
• When possible minimize the information on a given slide.
• It is often better to use two slides with half as much information on each slide

Things to Remember When Delivering the Talk

• Talk to the audience.
• Think about looking at a single person in the eye as you talk.
• Make an effort to talk slowly, and clearly
  • Hear each word
  • Take a breadth
• Ask yourself if you are looking at the screen
• Keep the laser pointer fixed in space as much as possible
  • When possible avoid shining it into the audience and blinding them!
• Incorporate a bit of humor (even feeble self deprecating humor)- Don’t be glib.