A requirement of the class is that you present your project results in an AGU/GSA style presentation. You will have a 15 minute slot in which to present. You should plan for 12 minutes of presentation and 3 minutes of questions. If you run over, I will shoo you off the stage as I would at a professional meeting. Please prepare your presentation in Power Point and make it available on your class web site so that we can link to it in class
You will be graded on your presentation as follows:
| 25% | Organization and Clarity |
| 25% | Brevity and Pace |
| 25% | Content |
| 25% | Peer Comments |
Notice that there is no category for Charm or Poise. If your presentation includes something interesting to present and is well organized and paced, you will do well. Notice also that you will be commenting on the presentations of your peers. You will not provide a grade, but will comment on the three other categories.
Please read the following regarding effective oral presentations. It will help you understand what I am looking for in a presentation..
Giving
effective oral presentations is an integral part an academic or public sector
career. With respect to scientific
research, oral presentations are used to "advertise" your work, solicit
input, and spark interest in you papers. With respect to a consulting career, presentations are used
to win contracts and summarize work that has been done. Because technical and financial decisions are often made during
high-pressure meetings, effective presentations are probably of greater importance
in the public sector than academia.
Some
people are better public speakers than others.
Although being comfortable and glib in front of an office certainly makes
public speaking easier, it is not the main ingredient in a successful technical
presentation. The typical
time allotted for a technical speaker in national meeting in the Geosciences (e.g. AGU, GSA) is 15 minutes.
In that time you must introduce yourself and your topic, motivate the
audience to listen, make your arguments, summarize your conclusions, and give
credit to collaborators. For this reason, it is much more important to be organized
and succinct than charming.
A
much used outline for giving oral presentations is (1) tell your audience what
you are going to say, (2) say it, (3) tell them what you just said.
This isn't bad advice, as long as you are not following it literally.
It is insulting to most audiences for a speaker to actually give an outline
of their talk at the outset. For
a 10 min talk, it is at least not very efficient.
It is better to lay out your presentation as you might tell a story.
Start by showing a title and the people responsible for the work, paper,
or report. You do not need to read
this aloud. It is better to put
up the title and just tell the audience, what you are talking about.
Give the topic of your talk, usually a paraphrasing of the title, and
then proceed quickly to the motivation for your work.
If you don't hook your audience at this point, you will lose them for
the rest of the talk. WHY is anyone
interested in the research, WHY does the proposed project need to be completed?
In any audience you will have those people who are close enough to the
topic that they will be interested in anything you say, and those who will not
be interested no matter what you say.
The trick is to draw the rest of the audience in.
Target
the motivational content to the audience at hand. If you are speaking to a room full of people intimately familiar
with the topic, say at a special session at a research conference, you don't
have to waste time filling them in on the deep background. If you are giving
a talk to a more diverse audience, you will have to devote more time to deep
background. For example, if I was
going to give a talk about measurement of matrix diffusion using ground-water
tracers to a general scientific audience, I might outline it like this:
1.
Contaminant transport in fractured rock is important because we bury
waste in rock, and certain pollutants tend to sink through surface soils and
into bedrock.
2.
Mass can move very quickly through fractures, because fracture porosity
in rock is very small.
3.
The rate of transport in fractures may be mitigated by diffusion of mass
from the fractures into the bulk rock.
4.
To make transport predictions, we need field-scale measurements of
diffusion into the bulk rock.
5.
The only way to make these measurements is by using tracers.
People have hypothesized that a tailing effect observed in a tracer breakthrough
curve indicates matrix diffusion.
6.
This hypothesis has never really been tested, although it is routinely
relied upon.
7.
The experiments presented here are designed to test this hypothesis.
However,
if I was speaking to a ground water audience I might start at 2. If I was speaking
at a special session on contaminant transport in fractured rock, I could skip
right to 3 or even 4.
The
structure of the remainder of the talk should follow organically from the introduction.
In the example above, I have told the audience that I have set out to
prove a hypothesis. The data I
present, and the conclusions I draw, should therefore relate back to this hypothesis.
All of the information that you
give in the talk should be directly traceable back to the originally stated
purpose of the talk. All other information is tangential and should be removed,
regardless of how important or clever you personally think that material is.
No
matter how you design your talk, you should always end with a summary or conclusion
section. This should be one or
two slides maximum, containing no more than three bullets per page.
These bullets should convey those few concepts that you would want your
audience to have, if you had to choose only a few (which will probably be the
case). Many people will listen
to the title of the talk and a few words of an introduction, and not look up
again until they hear you say "to summarize…"
You need to address those members of the audience in only three slides.
Presentations
styles have changed very rapidly in the last 10-15 years.
Easel boards, flip charts, and hand-drawn overheads have been replaced
by slick computer-generated figures and slides.
The bar has been raised, so you might as well get familiar with the available
software for creating polished presentations. In
practice, you will probably have the choice of using projection slides, transparencies,
or even a presentation given directly from your computer. Each offers different advantages. My personal preference is transparencies.
When printed on a transparency using an ink-jet printer, they look almost
as good as slides. They are cheaper to make, can be done at the last minute if
you have the printer, and allow you to cheat and look down at your presentation
without turning away from your audience.
For
your presentation in class, you will not need to use these software, but I would
like to see certain guidelines followed when you prepare your visual aides.
Do not go too fast A good guide is that each slide (except titles and simple figures) should be up for at least 60 seconds, but average closer to 90 seconds. For a 10 minute talk, that means you should plan to show only 8-10 slides.
Keep it simple Each slide or transparency should convey no more than three points. Do not show any numbers, table entries, or plots that you do not reference in your talk.
Use color to your advantage The human eye is drawn to color. Highlight important terms and concepts using color. If you are not computer generating your transparencies, this can be done simply by underlining in color. By the same token, if you are using computer generated plots do not over use color. You can easily drown out your concepts by putting up beautiful color backgrounds and borders.
Don't be wordy Do not project everything you are saying in front of your audience, that's why you are there in person. NEVER read a slide verbatim, even though it may be tempting if you are nervous.
Label Everything on your Plots Make sure all of your axes and plot points are labeled properly. It is easy to miss this when you are familiar with your data. The same is true for figures, make sure that the title indicates what the audience is looking at. Use color to draw eyes to the important aspects of the figure or map.
To
those of use not born to perform, it is very difficult to look comfortable and
professional in front of an audience.
You will probably have a list of 10 things that you don't want to do
when you get up there, and then will proceed to do 9 of them because you are
nervous. In fact, most of the little
twitches, ums, ahs, stutters, and nervous mannerisms will go unnoticed if you
cover the important components:
Eye Contact Look at your audience. If you can't do that, look slightly over there head so that they think you are looking at the people in the back. It destroys relationship with your audience if you are just looking at your visual aides or at your feet. Don't spend much time facing the screen. Here is where transparencies are and advantage, because you don't have to turn away to see what then next slide is.
Never Read from Notes I know you may be nervous, but reading directly from a card will ensure your failure. People expect to be talked to during an oral presentation. That is the point of attending the talk rather than reading a paper. If you are worried about getting stuck, jot some big font bulleted points on small cards that you can glance at in an emergency. Chances are, you won't need them, but they will make you feel better.
Respect but Don't Fear Your Audience You want to maintain a balance between professionalism and congeniality. Don't be too chatty, there may be serious issues at hand. At the very least, people will have invested a certain amount of time in money to see you talk, you need to respect that. By the same token, don't be afraid to let your personality show through.
Dress Appropriately For most venues, there is a uniform. For a business meeting it is almost always formal business attire. For technical conferences, it depends on the audience. Geologists tend to dress down, so you might stand out in a business suit. Ask around before you go to a conference, anyone who has been there before will know. You should be aware, however, that as a student you will be expected to dress just a little bit better than your sloppy professors. I don't know why, it's just that way.
Rehearse The amount intensity of rehearsal required varies tremendously from person to person. At a minimum, however, you need to establish that your talk can be presented in the time allotted. This is best done by rehearsing in front of friends and colleagues so that they can tell you if you are talking too fast. In general, it is very useful to present in front of a friendly audience before taking the show on the road. It is much better to clarify technical points in front of them, than in front of a large group. In a business setting, usually one person will present the results of many workers. The rehearsal is also the only chance that your collaborators will have input into how their work is presented.
As
a final note, consider this calculation.
It probably costs the average attendee at the Fall American Geophysical
Union Meeting in San Francisco about $1800 to make three days of the meeting.
In this time, the average attendee might attend 15 talks in a day.
That's about $120 a talk. From
your perspective, you will have maybe 50-100 people in your audience.
That means that the total investment in your talk might be $6000-12,000.
When you are preparing your visual aides and your presentation, ask yourself
whether you are giving your audience their money's worth.
The least you can do is be organized, rehearsed, and have effective and
polished visual aides.