Academic tips for graduate students

Issue #1, Saturday October 22nd, 2011 This issue is written by Dr. Mohamed Omar Abdelgawad Mechanical Engineering Department Assiut University

Ten simple rules for making good oral presentations

Summary of an Editorial published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology by Philip E. Bourne, vol. 3, issue#4, pp. 0593

Rule 1: Talk to your audience Prepare your presentation for the target audience. Be sure you know who your audience is; are they unexperienced undergraduate students or an experienced audience of graduate students and faculty members? What are their backgrounds and knowledge level of the material you are presenting? Are you talking about a field totally new to them or about a contribution to an existing field they are familiar with? What do you want them to get out of this presentation? Rule 2: Less is more A common mistake of inexperienced presenters is to try to say too much. They feel the need to prove themselves by proving to the audience that they know a lot. As a result, the main message is often lost. Your knowledge of the subject is best expressed through a clear and concise presentation that is provocative and leads to a dialog during the question-and-answer session when the audience become active participants. At that point, your knowledge of the material will likely become clear. Rule 3: Only give a presentation when you have something to say Remember the audiences time is precious and should not be abused by presenting uninteresting preliminary material. Only go to present in conferences or meetings when you have interesting findings/results. This does not apply to presentations in your group meetings where you present whatever you have reached so far and get a feedback from your colleagues and supervisor on the best way to proceed or on how to solve the challenges you are facing. Rule 4: Make the take home message persistent Repeat what you want your audience to remember throughout your presentation. Choose the most important conclusions of your work and stress them by different means during the presentation. Rule 5: Be logical Think of the presentation as a story. There is a logical flowa clear beginning, middle, and an end. You set the stage (beginning), you tell the story (middle), and you have a big finish (the end) where the take-home message is clearly understood. Rule 6: Treat the Floor as a stage Presentations should be entertaining, but do not overdo it and do know your limits. If you are not humorous by nature, do not try and be humorous. If you are not good at telling anecdotes, do not try and tell anecdotes, and so on. Rule 7: Practice and time your presentation This is particularly important for inexperienced presenters. The more presentations you give, the better you are going to get. Try to practice your talk in lab group meetings; your colleagues will point out obvious discrepancies in a kinder and gentler way. Rule 8: Use visuals sparingly but effectively Some presenters can captivate the audience with no visuals (rare); others may not be able to present a particular topic well without the appropriate visuals such as graphs and charts. Rule 7 will help you to define the right number of visuals for a particular presentation. The visual should support what you are saying either for emphasis or with data to prove the verbal point. Two rules of thumb are: Label your pictures and graphs clearly so that everyone can get the message out of the picture/graph even if he missed your comment on it. Avoid showing very long videos; most probably your audience will get board waiting for the interesting part. So always try to make your videos less than 20 seconds. Trim your video to keep

only the relevant parts or speed up the video if all of it is important. You can edit videos using simple software like Windows Movie Maker which is available on any windows PC. Rule 9: Review your presentation, specially the audio and/or video in your presentation Seeing what is wrong is easy, correcting it the next time around is not. You will likely need to break bad habits that lead to the violation of the other rules. Work hard on breaking bad habits; it is important. Rule 10: Provide appropriate acknowledgment Acknowledge the help you got from people to produce the work you are presenting, but remember that having many gratuitous acknowledgements degrades the people who actually contributed. It is often appropriate to acknowledge people at the beginning or at the point of their contribution so that their contributions are very clear.