Tips for giving a research presentation (especially to a more general audience)
When you give a research presentation* (especially to a more general audience), you’re telling a story. And you’re the director and producer.
Blog: https://bit.ly/researchtalktipsblog
*note: this advice is mostly for talked aimed mainly at a low-stakes talk to a more general general audience (e.g. a presentation for a summer research program). If you are giving a talk to specialists, you won’t need as much background and will likely need more specifics.
WARNING: Please do not interpret any of this as sounding like I’m advocating for “cherrypicking” data (only using and showing results that support what you want findings to be, while ignoring contradictory data). Rather, everything you show should be representative (and hopefully replicated) findings. Just nothing extraneous (rather than nothing contradictory). You cannot misrepresent your work to your audience! But you can simplify it (as hard and painful as that might be when you’re an expert in the details and nuances. Do though, be careful not to oversell your findings. Rather, be forthcoming and explicit about your work’s limitations, need to replicate, etc.
That out of the way, let’s get back to producing your story. Speaking of producing, you’ve surely produced a LOT of work. Much more than you’ll actually present. So you have to choose which things you want to present.
It can be really hard to not show stuff, when you (rightfully) think it’s all just oh so important and exciting. BUT, if you show oodles of stuff, the audience will be overwhelmed, not know what to focus on, and ultimately come away with less
How to choose? Think back to the whole story idea – what findings are the most important for helping you tell your story? Try to find a graph or other figure of data that shows each of those points, then shape your slides around them.
Come up with a draft outline of your talk and slides. Keep the following things in mind:
Title slide
The title can be more “fun” and less technical than the title of a paper for a technical journal or something
Include your name, your lab head (PI)’s name, and the date
May want to include school/institute logo
Intro
Big picture relevance: Why should they care?
Start by getting the audience interested (and hopefully amping up your own personal excitement level – the more passion you can show towards your research, the more engaging your talk will be and it will excite the audience as well)
Background:
Give as much (and only as much) background as the audience needs to understand your talk and your work’s relevance
Too much background can be a bad thing, overwhelming your audience before you even get to your work – it also makes it hard for them to know what is important (and thus what to try to retain), so they just “give up”
You can also introduce bits of background as needed throughout the talk. This is a great strategy to not overwhelm the audience and to also give them relevant information at the point at which it’s actually relevant, rather than needing them to remember it
Be sure to cite your sources (including for any figures you use but didn’t make yourself)
Overall goal
Before transitioning from background into your work, drive home the overall goal of your project (which the audience should now have the necessary background to understand)
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