Scenario #1: Conference Talk
One situation we are all likely to face is presenting our work at conferences. Imagine the situation:
After two years locked in your office working on your latest methodological “breakthrough”, you are finally ready to present your work. You have decided to give a talk at the 8th annual Conference Regarding Acceptable But Not To Be Ever Used Methodology (CRANEUM), being held next month in the beautiful city of Sfuville in Ubcistan. The conference is small and specific to your area of work. The presentation will be 20 minutes in length and will be the fourth in a panel of five talks related to your area of research.
Summarize your ideas for giving a successful presentation in this situation. Here are some questions to help guide your thinking, although they are by no means exhaustive:
- Consider similar presentations you may have attended as an audience member. What presentations impressed you and why? Have you experienced presentations that were terrible? If so, what mistakes did the speaker make?
- As a speaker, what are the most important aspects of presenting at a conference? How might you best achieve those goals?
- What makes a presentation from a small, area specific conference different from a presentation at a large conference like the SSC or JSM? What other types of conferences might you attend?
- What are some general presentation dos and don’ts? Can you think of any specific dos and don’ts for the scenario described?
1.
- Don't assume everyone knows all methods. Even if everyone has a common background, methodological approaches can still be different.
- Compare your work to other recently published results and put it in context.
- Usually bad presenters lack general presentation skills (see 4. for do's and don'ts).
- Good presentations (even completely outside of your field of interest) are interesting because they are presented well.
- As a general guideline: If you follow the do's in 4. and avoid the don'ts, your presentation will be great. All it will take is to tweak it a bit depending on how knowledgeable your audience is.
2.
- Make sure everyone gets at least something out of the presentation.
- Practice your presentation before the conference. Figure out the backgrounds of your audience. If some people are not in your subject area, it is good to introduce some background of your research.
- Keeping audience attention by doing all things mentioned in Q4.
- Why are you doing your work? What is the difference between your work and others?
3.
- The audience will be more familiar with your subject area and perhaps your work
- Less focus will need to be put on terminology and background, as the audience will probably have a better understanding of this to begin with
- You may want to spend more time preparing for the potential questions. Since the conference topic is so specific other researchers working on the same types of problems are more likely to be there, and could have tougher questions about your work than you might expect at a larger conference.
4.
Do’s:
-make slides an appropriate size by writing big and clear (assume everyone is seated in the last row)
-keep the amount of writing in each slide to a minimum
-rehearse as much as possible, both alone and in front of peers
-maintain eye contact and use appropriate body language (ie keep your hands out of your pockets)
-keep the number of formulas to a minimum
-use graphs whenever possible as opposed to explaining things in words
Don’ts:
-use a variety of colors when not needed
-fidget
-assume everyone is familiar with your area of research
Specific Do’s and Don’ts:
-do be more brief on your background
-do talk loud and slowly as your audience will be of many different ethnicities
-do some background on other speakers and their work
-do focus on the introduction and results and less on the methods