Presenting results: Talks and Posters

Giving Conference Talks & Posters: Why & How?

Why?

• To present your work/theory/research
• It is an opportunity for peers to ask you questions about your work
• You want your audience/viewers to walk away remembering a few key points
• So your goal is to be as clear as possible

Kinds of Presentations:

Talks
• Research Presentations (typically 12 to 30 mins)
• Paper with respondent
• Panel Presentation
• Roundtable
• Workshop
• Posters

Preparation

• Consider your audience
  - who are they, what do they want, what do they already know
• Start collecting the things that you think that you'll need
  - graphs, tables, pictures, examples, etc.
• Determine the key points that you want them to remember
• Camping trip analogy
  Put in what you'll need, then realize that there is too much, so need to decide what do you take out.
• Practice, rehearse, and then practice again

Organization

Very similar to the hourglass shape that we discussed for writing a paper:
• Introduction of the issue
• Background information
• Specific hypotheses
• Design
• Results
• Interpret the results
• General Conclusions

Basic content

• Create a logical progression to the presentation
• Talks: Start with an attention grabber, wake the audience up.
• Be brief, but include enough details so that the audience can follow the arguments
• Be careful of jargon, explain terms (if in fact you really need them)
• Include tables, graphs, pictures, etc. to help simplify/clarify points

The oral presentation

• Make it smooth (lots of practice will help)
• Watch your speaking rate (again, practice)
• Maintain eye contact with whole audience
• Emphasize the key points, make sure that the audience can identify these
• Point to the slides if it helps
• Beware jokes, can be a double-edged sword
• Don't go over your time
• Talk hints

  The poster presentation

  • Allows presentation for in-depth technical discussions
  • Prepare a little "talk" that runs through the poster
  • Display your message clearly and strikingly to attract people who might have an interest
  • The success of a poster depends not only on its scientific merit but also on its organization and layout.
  • A successful poster is a balanced mixture of textual and pictorial presentation of the work.
  • The basic rule is to keep it simple, do not clutter, do not include unnecessary data, make every thing bold and large, and try and get your message even to the non-experts in your field.
    • Logical organization
    • Mixture of text and figures
    • Main "take home" points only
    • Issue
    • Hypotheses
    • Method
    • Results
    • Conclusions

• A sample poster
• Poster presentation hints

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  Preparing for questions

  • Repeat the question in your own words
    - so that the rest of the audience can hear it
    - to make sure that you understood the question
    - to buy yourself some time to think about the answer
    
  • Try not to be nervous
    - you know your study better than anyone else
  • ** When preparing, try to think of likely questions and prepare answers

  Checklist

  I. Preparation
  • Analyze the audience
  • Choose your topic
  • etc.
  II. Prepare the Final Outline
  • fix any problems/loose ends
  III. Construct your "speaking" outline
  • e.g., the note cards that you'll read
  IV. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse

I will assign you to a Group of 4 students.poster groups.

Each group will prepare a poster which presents our class experiment It should include all parts of a poster: Title, Authors, Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusions, and References Due: in class the final week classes, we will have "poster sessions".