Making presentations/posters
See also Group Tutorials
Tell a story: What was the motivation/problem/challenge? What did you do? Why did you do it? What did you find? What is the major insight that you want people to get out of your presentation? What are you going to do next?
If you don’t talk about it, don’t put it in: presentation clutter is distracting and no one in the audience will have enough time to digest what is there. Everything on the slide must be put there with some intention in mind.
If it is included, describe it: conversely, if you include a graphic, be sure to describe it (e.g., “This is a plot of x versus y. We computed these many samples representing these conditions. One can see as x does this, y does this from which we can conclude this”). This seems rather obvious, but you would be surprised how many times this does not happen.
Everything needs to be bigger: the font, the images, the axes labels, the plots. The person with poor eyesight in the back needs to be able to see your presentation
No blocks of text: no one is going to want to spend the time or mental capacity to read blocks of text and listen to you talk. Use bullet points and short sentences, use an image or a schematic.
Know your audience: is the target first year graduate students, people from a different field, experts? While the results may be more important in a scientific talk with experts in the audience, a general audience talk may benefit more from having more emphasis on motivations.
A picture is worth a thousand words: a simple schematic can help wonders in explaining a complex idea
Practice, practice, practice: get the wording down, get the timing down, get the transitions between parts down, and end with a strong conclusion.
Use a color wheel or pre-designed colors: the choice of color is important. A lot of work goes into picking the right colors. For instance, check out the work that went into the color map scheme viridis in matplotlib.
Have backup slides: anticipate questions from the audience
Be confident, and also humble and polite: You did the work! You know more about your work than anyone else in the room. Nevertheless, there may be other perspectives that are important to consider as well that can improve your work.
Every talk is a job talk: An apt and frequently used description of presentations. Treat every talk you give seriously. You never know who might be in the audience.
Arrive in the space early enough to set up: become familiar with the physical (or virtual) space you are going to present in; anticipate and pre-empt technical difficulties. For instance, I always bring a flash drive with my presentation in multiple formats (including *.pdf) in case something weird happens with my laptop. Sometimes I bring my own dry erase markers if I think discussions after could use them.
Resources on making presentations and posters:
Videos on making your poster from Mike Morrison:
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