Presentations: Practicing What I Preach

It’s been a number of years since I taught our department’s Research Methods course. The course has a cool structure (in my opinion)! As the course instructor I meet with the students once a week for an hour for “class time”. Students are also working in the research lab of a faculty member 8 hours a week during the semester. The course also fulfills the Upper Division Writing Requirement of the curriculum, i.e., in this case students will write a lengthy report about their research in the format of a research publication.

We begin the class with teaching the students about research resources: databases, how to find articles, using a citation manger, reviewing literature in their research field, etc., before moving on to the nuts and bolts of writing. We then go through how to write the different portions of a research publication: Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion. The students turn in multiple drafts of their writing, and on top of that have to make several oral presentations of their work throughout the semester. Towards the end of the semester we have a couple of sessions on research ethics, careers in science, and peer review. (Students participate in peer review of their classmates’ papers – and they get another shot at revising these before turning in their final reports.)

This past Friday, I went through “How To Give Presentations”. We discussed the different kinds of presentations that scientists give in different forums. Students were good at coming up with all sorts of tips. (Clearly some of them already have experience giving presentations in other classes.) We also scrutinized some research posters, and the students critiqued different aspects. All this was great timing for the upcoming American Chemical Society national conference in two weeks’ time. I’m giving a research talk and some of my students will be presenting posters. Unfortunately for the first time ever, the session where my students will be presenting coincides with mine. I’ll be able to catch the start of their session before I have to run off for my talk. This has not happened in previous years and is an unlucky coincidence I suppose.

As we were discussing oral presentations in class on Friday, I was reminded of my bad habits when putting together a talk. I talk fast and go through things rather quickly. (Students who have taken my classes will nod their heads vigorously in agreement. It keeps them on their toes, and no one is using non-class related social media or checking their phones simply because they quickly learn they cannot multitask effectively in my class in that way.) My presentation speed exceeds one slide per minute in a research talk. (I don’t use slides in my classes except to show a picture on occasion. The bulk is boardwork.) My slides are also information-dense, not with text per se, but simply with data. Over the years I have reduced the density and number of slides, but it still far exceeds the norm.

So I was very strongly reminded in my class on Friday that I should practice what I preach. I haven’t gotten around to making my slides yet for my presentation in two weeks. (I used to get these things done way ahead of time as a young faculty member, but as my administrative burden has increased, this gets harder to do.) I try not to give the same talk twice. By that I mean covering the bulk of the same material, so it’s actually a fair amount of work to put together a talk since I’m not just slapping together old slides. I try to discuss current work (usually unpublished) although the project is typically reasonably far along that I have plenty of data to share. My goal was to start working on my talk today, but my time got “used” up in other ways at work – all productive, just not always what I plan to do. I suppose if I plan a less dense talk with fewer slides, it might take me less time to prepare. Perhaps that’s a good motivation to practice what I preach. I also tell my students never to wait until the last minute. For many years I’ve practiced what I preach, but it seems to get more difficult every year.