 Hi, my name is Natalie Rogers. I'm the Public Information Specialist for New Mexico EPSCORE and I'm here today to talk to you about presentation methods and skills. Should be a pretty brief webinar. Here's just a little agenda for what I'm going to talk about, just a brief introduction, talking about some presentation methods and presentation skills, and then I'll give you some tips at the very end. So we'll start off with a quote from Albert Einstein, which is really pointed, not just giving a presentation about your research, but a presentation about anything really. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough, and that's a good place to start. When preparing for your presentation, no matter what kind of a presentation it is or what it's about, you first want to ask yourself, what is my communication objective? Some objectives might include you want to inform your audience, you want to propose something, maybe you're asking for something, perhaps more funding, or maybe you want to engage in a discussion. And of course, this all depends on who your audience is. You're not going to give the same presentation to a group of PhDs as you would to a group of seventh graders. No matter what kind of presentation you're giving or what the topic is, you always want to tailor your presentation to your audience. Something else to remember is you can remember through a quote by Maya Angelou, which is that people will forget what you said and people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And this can be true for presentations. You can really reach your audience and reach their feelings, sort of make them feel excited about what you're excited about or make them feel, you know, concerned about the topic that you're researching and make them feel that it's worthwhile to continue researching. Invoking people's feelings is one of the main keys of a successful presentation. So when we're talking about presentation methods, you first want to pick your poison, pick which one you're interested in. Most events allow for poster presentations as well as oral presentations. You can submit an abstract for both. Poster presentations or poster sessions are pretty straightforward, but there are several types of oral presentations you might encounter in your academic careers or after you're out of school. Some of those include speeches, which are often long and formal, with no visual aids. You can also give a keynote, a conference keynote, or perhaps a TED talk. They're both very similar, depending on the conference and also the TED talk itself. It couldn't be kind of long, but they tend to be anywhere between five and 20 minutes long. Conference keynote can sometimes go a little bit longer depending on the conference. Most keynotes will go, you know, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Those often have very few visual aids. Sometimes at a TED talk, there'll be some slides in the background, but the presenter always has his back to the slides and always talking to the audience and there's never any sort of reference to the slides or very rarely. The presentations that you're used to are the ones that are less than an hour. They're usually a seminar, a lecture, or a talk. And these can include seminars and lectures that professors can give in university classes. They tend to be less than an hour and they rely heavily on visual aids. So you're always going to have some slides in the background and obviously that can present its own set of problems if you don't know how to use PowerPoint well. And finally, you could also hold a workshop or a class. These tend to be a little bit more interactive, combines teaching with interaction and because nobody wants to sit in a workshop where they don't get to do anything. It's a very, very hands-on and the length can depend. It can go anywhere from, you know, a couple of hours to all day to, you know, a week. To prepare for all presentations, I've talked about this in some of my previous presentations before, but these are the four main steps that you want to do to prepare. You want to think about what you're going to talk about. Obviously, like I said, you need to know your audience. Set a goal for what you want that audience to walk away with and make a plan for how you're going to get there and how you're going to get there in a concise and simple way. You want to also make a draft and sort of write out what you want to say. This doesn't necessarily have to be word for word, although that does help some people. You definitely want to make an outline of the big points that you're trying to make. You would definitely want to try and tell a story. When you have 20 minutes to fill or even an hour to fill, you're definitely going to lose some of your audience if you don't bring sort of that personal touch to it and telling a story, whether it's about your research or about sort of the experience that you had while in the field or while in the lab, something like that will sort of hook your audience and allow their attention to sort of stay with you. You want to have a good design, obviously, when you're using tons of slides, you want to avoid death by PowerPoint, which I've talked about in previous presentations. Your slides aren't a crutch. You need to be able to know what you're talking about and you need to be able to give your presentation without turning around and staring at your slides for guidance. Your slides should have very, very few bullets on them. Mostly, they should be a visual guide and can, you know, your slides can help you along if you get stuck, but you don't want to depend on them. And then finally, you want to optimize your presentation and that means practice. Practicing in front of a mirror, in front of family, in front of pets, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a little bit. So poster presentations are a little bit different. They should be considered a snapshot of your research and should communicate, communicate your research clearly while encouraging a reader to want to learn more. It's sort of a concise version, a more visual version of an academic paper. You have room for your conclusions and your results and your methods, which you may not have a whole lot of time to discuss and say an oral presentation. You can actually display it on your poster. You don't want to go overboard though. And posters are an important component of communicating science to the public students and faculty. You want to make sure that your poster draws in the reader. You want to bring those, because you'll be standing next to your poster, you'll want to bring those people to you. There's some similarities between a poster presentation and an oral presentation. A lot of conferences, like I said, have both. They both have oral components. You're definitely going to be talking to people when you give a poster presentation. There are some similar design rules in terms of you only want to use two to three fonts at the most. You want to use lots of lovely imagery, pictures, graphs, charts, things like that. You're still going to have an audience and you're still going to need to tailor your poster to that specific audience and you still want to tell a story and you want to include some data to back up what you're saying. Some of the main differences include the media. Obviously, you're using a printed-out poster rather than a computer or a slide projector or an overhead projector. It's a little less formal, so you don't have people sitting in front of you and you're standing up in front of them giving it this sort of formal, you're the speaker, they're the audience. There's a little bit more room for interaction. People are going to ask you questions as you're explaining your poster. So it's a little less structured. You still want to be able to concisely describe your research, but you don't have to be real stiff about it. You can be a lot more personal. The length or time that someone will spend at your poster will likely be a lot less than it would at an oral presentation. Some oral presentations will say are 20 minutes. It's likely you talk to someone about your poster for less than 10 minutes. The detail that you'll have in your poster can vary compared to oral presentations. Oral presentations, you're not going to have a whole lot of detail. You're kind of going over the main basic points of each section. This you can add a little bit more detail. To prepare for poster presentations is a little bit similar to oral presentations in that a lot of the work, in fact, most of the work will go into the design of your poster. There's not as much preparation for the oral portion of your poster presentation. With oral presentations, you really want to, as I'll say again, prepare. You want to practice in front of people. Poster presentations, you don't necessarily have to do that so much. Most of the work will go into the design. So you want a stated purpose of your poster. You want to make sure that your poster has a reason for being there. And that should make clear, you know, are you trying to engage your readers in a discussion? Are you expressing your interest in a collaboration? Are you trying to convey a really exciting new discovery? So you just want to make sure that your poster states that up front or that you state that up front if your poster doesn't. The title of your poster is extremely important. It's probably going to be the most visible part of your poster. And it should be akin to a newspaper headline, which is concise and attention grabbing. Don't use all caps. Use sentence case so you don't want to capitalize every letter necessarily and try not to make it too long. You know, I've seen a lot of poster titles that are just ridiculously long, you know, three lines. Try to make it a little bit more concise. You can always have a subtitle, but your main title wants you want it to be big and you want it to be pretty short so that it'll fit on just that one line across your poster. Again, your presentation even for a poster should be audience catered. Not everyone reading your poster. In fact, most people reading your poster probably will not be in your field. You want to avoid jargon not only on your poster itself, but also when you're speaking to people. And you want to make sure that everyone who approaches you can understand your research. You can use your abstract to create a simplified content. But again, abstracts can be pretty jargon heavy, so you want to try and avoid that. So you want to create clarity and not confusion with your poster, meaning your poster should be easy to read. You shouldn't, you know, throw a whole bunch of text up on there and expect people to read it all. You want to have a font that's really clear and easy to read. Layout and format are almost as important as the content itself. Your poster should guide the eye easily from one logical step to another. This includes margins and grids and white space. White space is the space between your words and between your images. You want to make sure that everything has room to breathe. There's a trick that you can use to make sure that your type is big enough on your poster without printing out the full poster and wasting that money. You can print out the full poster on an eight and a half by eleven sheet and hold it out at arms length. If you can still read the text and make sense of the pictures and graphs, then it should be big enough when you print it out on the full 48 by 36 inch poster. You want to keep your content concise. Everything on your poster should contribute to your main message. Use negative space or white space. Provide graphs and images and don't overuse text and edit, edit, edit. If this is your first time presenting a poster, be especially ruthless with editing the amount of text on your poster. Honestly, less is more when it comes here. Nobody's going to read all of the text on your poster and you don't necessarily want them to force yourself to be concise and clear. And then finally, give your poster some personality. It can be more personal than a paper. Use a unique display that'll allow your poster to stand out among other posters. And you can go online and look for some great examples. And I'll also share some at the end of this presentation. So here are some general presentation skills. And we're going back to it again. One does not simply give good presentations with no prep. And that includes poster presentations and oral presentations. A one hour oral presentation will require 30 hours of prep time. So that means for half an hour presentation, you'll still need 15 hours of prep time. Practice in front of everyone you know. Pets, family, friends, make them sit down and watch your presentation. And give you some tips on what you look like when you're actually presenting in front of them, whether you're fidgeting or saying lots of ums. And you want to revisit your content again and again and again. Mark Twain once said, it usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Luckily, this isn't an impromptu speech. So you have plenty of time to practice. And the more you practice, the more comfortable you'll be during the event. You'll want to, you know, practice your presentation and show your PowerPoint to anyone who will sit and listen to you and provide good feedback. Not just on the presentation itself, like I said, but also on you, your habits, your nervous giveaways. When you say um, when you say like, you can practice in front of a mirror. I can, I would also suggest practicing in front of a video camera, which can be really painful to watch of course, but it will also help you realize there's certain things that you might do with your hands or the way you stand or the things you say that you might want to work on. For poster presenters, practice and hone your elevator speech. Poster visitors are usually busy people. There's a lot of posters to see. So you want to come up with a two sentence overview of your research before explaining anything else. If those two sentences are interesting enough, you'll, your poster reader, they'll want to learn more and they'll, you know, ask you questions and they'll want to hear more about what you were doing. If those two sentences bore them, they'll kind of move on. So you want to use that as sort of your hook to bring them in. So really practice that and test it on other people to see if they may, you know, it makes them want to learn more about your research. And when it finally comes time to present, you want to just keep calm and carry on. You know your research best because you did it and you wrote the papers and you wrote the presentation and you made the poster. So you know it best. So have confidence in yourself. As I said earlier, use your slides or your posters as a guide when you're talking to people. You don't want to turn around and stare at it and read off of it. But if you lose your place, which is easy to do, you know, you kind of get sidetracked or something leads you off topic, you can always use those slides and your poster to sort of bring you back. No cards are always okay. Sometimes people get nervous with just sort of winging it. So if you have some cue cards, no cards that you want to use or read from, I think that that's totally okay. And remember to use the imagery that helps tell your story. You don't want to just throw a picture of a gopher up on there just because it's cute. You know, make sure that your images relate back to what you're saying and what your research is about. And you always want to remember to drive home your important point, your main point that you started with, the one objective that you wanted people to take away from your research. You always want to keep in mind the big picture. If your point is too narrow, no one will care about the kind of research you're doing. You want to try to be able to connect it to sort of the bigger picture of why people who aren't in this field might care about what you're doing. Winston Churchill once said, if you have an important point, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver, hit the point once, then come back and hit it again, then hit it a third time, a tremendous whack, just to make sure that everyone gets it. And then just some final quick tips, some general do's and don'ts here. You're supposed to love your research, so show it. Always thank your visitors and include some personal interaction. Again, don't talk to your poster or your slides. You do want to dress nicely and show enthusiasm. Speak clearly and speak to your audience. Tell a story and say thank you. Try not to fidget. Definitely don't chew gum or anything else. Don't use jargon. That includes in the words on your slides. You can include a little jargon on your poster, but when you're speaking to people about your poster or about your research, don't use jargon. All it does is confuse people, and so you want to try and pair that down. That's part of, excuse me, that's part of your preparation for your presentation is, how do I explain this without using jargon? And I know that can be difficult sometimes, and I know it can sometimes seem like you're dumbing down your research, but it's better than alienating people in your audience who may not know what you're saying because they're not going to take away anything from you if you can't bring it down to their level. And it may be just that you're talking to a PhD who's in sociology or in mathematics and not biology and not physics. So it's just important to remember to sort of avoid that jargon. Don't turn your back to your audience. Try not to get off topic. It's really easy to do, and don't be vague. Be real specific about the things that you're talking about. And finally, a little quote from Beyonce who said, I don't have anything to prove to anyone. I only have to follow my heart and concentrate on what I want to say to the world. I run my world. So just concentrate on what you want to say to the world. Concentrate on what you want the world to know about what you're doing and the importance of what you're doing and what it means to you. And you'll rock your presentation, whether it's a poster or an oral presentation. So I hope that was useful. I know it was pretty quick. If you have questions, you can always email me at nrogers at ebscore.unm.edu. We have on our website, we have some PowerPoint and poster presentation templates. They're on our resources page. If you have trouble finding them, you can always contact me. And I do want to show real quick a couple of examples. So I'm going to pause the main screen here so I can get out of this presentation and I'll show you a couple of examples of some posters. So let me go to full screen here. Okay, so I've got some poster examples here. This one is a little strange. The table is a problem. It's hard to read. The background is distracting. Same image for both kids and it's kind of hard to read the title. This is a before somebody fixed it and it looks a little bit better now. You have a little bit more of the negative space. The table looks much better. And it's just easier to understand and it gets rid of that distracting gradient. Here's an interesting vertical poster, which is pretty rare. It's a good use of color, good choices of font, tracks attention from far away because it's a little bit different and it uses a good title. So what's the problem? Well, the problem is, you're not really sure where your eye is supposed to go. It doesn't really guide it around. So if we take a look, take a look at the after over here. You can see that you added, the person added a little bit of negative space kind of brought it down. So we look, we're supposed to go across first and then down. And the legend, or I'm sorry, the text at the bottom is a little bit smaller, which is really helpful for more space as well. So just a few tweaks to help the eye flow and this poster will certainly stand out at a large conference. This one's a little bit different. I'm not thrilled with the dark background, but it makes, definitely makes the poster stand out. It's viewable from a distance, catches your eye. It's got a great title. Websites right up there. You know, you got to get up close when you really want to see some detail, but it's still got some great imagery in there. And it's a pretty good use of flow. Your eye sort of knows where to go here. If you want to see something really risky and different, this is it. This is as simple as you can get. It's extraordinarily risky. It's assumed that the research team knows their material well and are very comfortable about speaking about it. This poster does not speak for itself. It helps you with the eye flow with the way that the different images are connected, but having a poster like this likely really depends on your audience. It's great for encouraging a reader to interact with the presenter. Doing something like this really comes down to personal preference. Okay. And those are the examples that I had. This is our example. This is our template. What did it look like? You can download it. You can download it on our website. So it's just bit.ly slash underscore templates. And that's where you can find our poster template as well as our PowerPoint template if you'd like to use that as well. So thank you very much. And I hope you enjoyed this little presentation. And I hope to hear from you soon.