Begin Every PhD Presentation Like a TED Talk

I don't know about you but my first scientific presentation was a nightmare when I thought about going to the stage and give a 15 minute talk about my ongoing project that did not have a conclusive data set in my first year of my study I was about to throw up welcome back to PhD coffee time this is the online community for you as a PhD candidate to gain motivation peer support and practical tips during a PhD so I hope by the end of this video by sharing my own experience on how I prepare my presentation especially as a non-native English speaker that will encourage you how you could also prepare a good scientific presentation if we haven't already met my name is Vera I make weekly content on this platform is going to support you as a PhD candidate to make you a successful PhD graduate make sure to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss anything in the future that is coming up to be helpful to you it was New Zealand in July 15 degrees Celsius was our winter temperature in Hong Kong so I still remember I walk up to the stage with this gigantic winter jacket I remember I was shaking and I felt even colder than the winter of New Zealand so first of all accept that you will be nervous even to this date I will still say I have a strong feeling when I speak in front of an audience but I now helped myself to identify that feeling as excitement I am excited and happy to be here and get all your attention looking at me and I think with this reinforcement is going to help you overcome fear this is the mindset that I hope you can first change the second mindset is to prepare the size and my first PowerPoint of 15 minute I almost used the whole week of work trying to get everything right even the font size and color will change over the week and it's almost like a vicious cycle of unproductive time and I hope by sharing this video I'm going to direct you to a progressing pipeline of getting your first powerpoints done without consuming you as much energy so before you even know to prepare a PowerPoint slide you can already prepare for yourself for being the next speaker when you go to someone's presentation you can already start taking mental notes on what are the style you'd like to have what are the color choices you think that is working well and not working well in that room with that intention ality is going to over the long time save you this puzzling moment to adjust your font type your color and playing with something that is a poor contrast so that in the future you have white background and light yellow funds that nobody can read you're going to develop sensitivity on how to make good slice it's by going to more online webinars busy taking scientific notes give yourself a notebook and try to write down what you like and what you don't like and what is your personal style some people like white background somebody like black background and their to school of thoughts apparently people who like black background because they think you will be more focused and people will be more captivated towards that shiny text but recently I was also learning that if you put a white background to it you're going to have a style that looks more like you have a published paper tell me in a comment below do you prefer black background for your PowerPoint or white background like my professors would suggest from the ecological standpoint I dunno if you use black background you'll be spending a lot less energy on projecting your slides so that is also one of the reason I use black background for most of my research work and I also think black backgrounds is showing well for microscopy images because a lot of them were having a black background so if you have a drowning white background you may not have the same sensitivity to it think before even you need to write a powerpoint on what your style can be and take notes of them you're going to help yourself save time in the future as a general rule if you are allowed to speak for 15 minutes you will be expected to have an exchange of question and answer for at least like two to three minutes that is telling you that you can speak for about 12 to 13 minutes so what most of the time people will give this rule of thumb speaking for one minute per slide type of speed depending on how many animation you have this is quite accurate for myself if I prepare 15 slides for 12 minutes awk then I will be more or less on time so if you have 15 minutes do not make a thirtieth slice PowerPoint and expecting yourself to work to be able to finish it because by the end you will be stressed that you can't finish on time everyone will be embarrassed by you and you will be even more embarrassed when people have to track you off the stage calculate how much time you will need for each slide and do not over prepare a number of slides for your talk second rule of thumb is each slide is ideally five or less thing so that first of all you won't just get really intimidated by that slide you will start with intro Russian materials and methods results and discussion so a lot of people struggle and they don't know how to start the scene and one thing I've learned over time is most of the good scientific talk on in the first five slides resemble a little bit of a micro lecture that it seems like you go into someone's classroom and they teach you something that you don't remember from your high school so what I recommend is you always start your first slide with something that is a common ground even you're going to a conference there will be different level of experience so I think a safe ground to start is to assume everyone has the same knowledge from the high school level and bring them to that tip of the human knowledge slowly scene after scene so maybe after five slide later you're going to teach them something to take home and they will be proud of it for knowing your five minute lecture on your topic so I also imagine it in a way that you are setting a since almost like a TED talk you're going to engage everyone in the room to understand the general importance of your work and the specific methodology that you're going to introduce and implement and why should they care what should they expect from this study you always thought with making sure your audience are all with you and trust me if even they are really knowledgeable audience they will appreciate that you did a good job in teaching because everyone loved to hear about their own field over and over again that's why they're in that research field so if you do them good justice in presenting your own research topic with passion and enthusiasm there's never too basic to start with as long as you progress well and give a good talk by the end of your introduction you should be able to do a few things first is to educate the background of your research by highlighting this big paper that everyone look at what this pot you in your field and how it advances your research and why you become curious in own specific objective another way of the introduction you can also start with a nice video starting with a time-lapse movie a race of hand and ask for awareness how many people have vacinated yourself with flu shots and if your if your talk is about influenza and Vasa nation also you can make an analogy that everyone can relate to like if you work on microbiome you can have an analogy on yoghurt so that's going to bring everyone with awareness that what you're talking is not too far from them and they get the connection to listen to you with the materials and method I already spoke about illustration in the last video I think is powerful to include illustration of your very mental design your lap photo procedure you need to do so make it graphical avoid using word to explain a methodology is the best if you can illustrate it with diagram or illustration and in your research section I think everyone's result is different is hard to just give a general rule of thumb but one tips I would give is to have a designated color scheme for the factors that you're looking at if you have a temperature effect make sure you choose an intuitive color like red is warm and blue is code that's going to help your audience understand what data point they're looking at is what treatment if it is scatterplot they will know automatically if it is a red it's like a Siddha treatment or warm temperature treatment or if you have a drug you can have brown or black if you have mortality you can have like a cross so think about what's intuitive for people to understand by it color and shape like in the intuitive way so as you go through all your data and methodology towards the end a lot of students get into this trap on putting a lot of written summary on what they have done it's almost like a liability waiver form that people put a lot of words saying this if if you didn't get it it's not me it's all there what I encourage you can think of doing is to make that visual like an illustration but you can still keep all the text if you if it is your defense you know you always want to have that as a backup slide consider either using your own illustration or looking at some published review paper and try to cite something that is relevant to your own graphic and annotate on top and say modify from whose paper and we should point to these pathways and think about it as a future study that would be a lot easier to digest than just writing we need this pathway XYZ to be analyzed as a bullet point another few thing to remember is I found it was not important to add page number on slides until one day someone told me if I add a number on the corner of my slide people who want to ask specific questions to your talk can notice the number of slides and ask you exactly which slides you go back to and ask the follow-up question so that's something I didn't consider and it's quite helpful also whenever you cite someone's paper or someone's figure as content source when you're citing someone's paper make sure you include the citation in the same slice instead of waiting into the end because nobody is going to read the final slice and a lot of people will appreciate that you share that information at the spot so if there is an interesting figure they can go ahead to educate themselves when they go home later of course before you get introduced for your talk you got some time standing in front of your cover slide so don't forget to put your Twitter ID maybe a 2d code that is going to link to your research gate or whatever to connect with you your email put it on your cover slides so that everyone look at you can immediately know how to contact you if they have a question or if they have an idea or collaboration for you so you don't miss any opportunity in that conference because you pay for that registration fee so might as well be more available to promote yourself trust me I think the accent is something you can work on over time but if you can deliver good content and nice stand a long slice that speaks for itself you automatically gain authority and Trust when we are in this age of pandemic you may be communicating online it's now more than ever important that you have good graphics to communicate your work if you're going to give a summary that has powerful graphics you're going to have a higher chance of engagement and your work is going to be more productive so at that's it for you I hope today's is helpful please comment below do you use black background or white background for your PowerPoint please comment below and if you like this video please make sure to hit the like button so that the algorithm knows that this is good content they will share it to more people as well as sharing my video to your own social media to share with your network and your students please make sure to hit the subscribe button if you think my content has been helping you and until the next time thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: PhDCoffeeTime

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Keywords: PhD coffee time, PhD tips and tricks, PhDcoffeetime, scientific talk, scientific talk powerpoint template, scientific presentation powerpoint example, public speaking for scientists, science communication PhD, science communication grad school, science communication powerpoint, public speaking phd, phd defense presentation slides, key to effective scientific presentation, feel more confident in phd defense presentation, feel more confident in science presentation

Id: YmsdsTFo4HY

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020