 The next AAAS meeting is one month away. It's back here in Seattle. I'm so excited. I hope you all will come and we'll share some science. So I think a lot of people are going to be giving their first AAAS talk or first big conference talk during this meeting because it's been a few years since many of us have been to one of these big events. And so for a lot of students, this will be their first time. So let me give you a few general tips about how to give a talk. And the first thing to keep in mind is that this is a really short talk, right? Usually I have like a 10 minute window, which is seven minutes for a talk, two minutes for questions, one minute to change over the speakers. Seven minutes is not a long time for a talk. And it goes by the other thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of us, these talks are going to be happening on Wednesday or Thursday. After several days of people just sitting in talks just like yours and their brains are going to be turned into like mush. So you got to keep it light. I think that's my number one tip for giving talks or any science presentation, whether it's an hour long lecture or an elevator pitch. You got to make it easy for the people who are listening and who want to take away your science because if they have to work hard, you're going to lose them. You got to make it easy for your audience to take away the meaning. So here are my four tips for making a good short talk. Number one, skip the outline. I always write an outline in my talks because I am a linear thinker like many people and I need to start at the beginning and tell the story and have an ending. But it's a five to seven minute talk. There is no time to waste a slide saying, okay, here's the outline where we're going to go. There's going to be a beginning where I set things up and I introduce you to my topic and then we'll talk about the methods and the data. And then we'll end with the conclusions and I'll have time for questions. You just wasted 7% of your talk talking about your talk. Write an outline slide and then delete it. Number two, it's only seven minutes. Keep the talk tight. Keep it focused on one or two, maybe three big points. So you get time for a couple of setup slides, a couple of method slides, and a couple of points. Rule of thumb is usually one minute per slide. So you got a seven minute talk. We're talking about seven slides. Maybe there's some builds. It's 10 slides. If your deck has 20 slides in it, you're in trouble. Okay, point number three, it's very much like point number one. No thank you slide. Again, I often make these. I want to say thank you. I am grateful to my audience and to the organizers and to the conference and to the people listening. I'm thankful to you right now. Thank you. And it's not that you don't have much time. It's that a thank you slide is useless. You can say thank you in words. You can even specifically say, I don't want to thank the organizers and the session chair and all of you for listening. That puts good things out into the world. But a thank you slide is a nuisance because at the end of a five or seven minute talk, my brain is still trying to wrap around what you said five minutes ago. And then you take away all the content and you just put up thank you. And my brain says, wait, what was that amazing conclusion slide a minute ago? What was that summary thing of the results? Make sure you have a conclusion slide with the main points. Look, you can make a thank you slide and say thank you. And then click back, click back to your conclusion slide. The audience wants to see the conclusion slide. I put a lot of effort into making graphs, which I think help convey the story I'm trying to tell. And so my conclusion slide is always just little thumbnail versions of the graphs that I've shown so that you can refer back to them. Okay. And number four, keep your name and your contact information visible. Definitely during your conclusion slide so people can remember what your name is. I know we're wearing big name tags, but I can't see your name tag when you're standing up there and I'm sitting back here in the audience. Put in the corner, your name or your Twitter handle. I keep my GitHub and Twitter handle in the corner of all my slides so that if somebody took a picture of my slides, there would be a little watermark there so they would remember who I am. Okay. Those are some fast tips when you're thinking about making your presentation for double S or for any venue. Make it easy for your audience to take away the thing that you want them to remember and make it easy for them to reach out to you and start off that science collaboration. Okay. Back to more Zoom meetings. See you in double S.