Final Year Project Defense
Why Worry Giving a Good Presentation?
- First impressions matter!
- There’s no point doing good work if others don’t know about it or can’t understand what you did.
- Good practice for a teaching career! Good practice for any career!
- Helps you sort out what you’ve done, and understand it better yourself.
Types of Presentations
- Quick 1-minute “what I do” talk
- 25 minute conference paper presentation
- Project presentation (defense)
- Thesis defense
- Job talk
What they have in common:
- Never enough time to talk about everything
- All of them reflect on you & need practice/polish
- Focus on a clear goal and message.
Top 10 Points for a Good Presentation
- Be neat
- Avoid trying to cram too much into one slide
- Don’t be a slave to your slides.
- Be brief
- use keywords rather than long sentences
- Avoid covering up slides
- Use a large font
- Use color to emphasize
- Use illustrations to get across key concepts
- You may want include limited animation
- Make eye contact
- Be ready to skip slides if time is short
- Practice !!
A “typical” Project Presentation Outline
- Title/author/affiliation (1 slide)
- Forecast (1 slide) Give gist of problem attacked and insight found
- Outline (1 slide)
- Background
- Motivation and Problem Statement (1-2 slides)
- Related Work (0-1 slides)
- Methods (1-3 slides) Explain your approach; illustrate algorithm
- Results (2-6 slides) Present key results and key insights. This is main body of the talk, but don’t try to show ALL results.
- Summary (1 slide)
- Future Work (0-1 slides)
- Backup Slides (0-3 slides) Optionally have a few slides ready to answer expected questions.
Other Important Things to Consider
- Oral communication is different from written communication
- Keep it simple and focus on a few key points
- Repeat key insights
- Be sensitive to your audience
- The same talk may need to be adjusted for a different audience
- Make the audience want to learn more
- Handling Questions and Answers is as important as the formal talk itself
How to Improve your Presentation?
- Practice by yourself
- Practice in front of friends
- Practice in front of a webcam
- Watch footage later… alone… as painful as that may be!
- Take note of effective speakers and adopt their successful habits
Expressing yourself technically helps you make and use professional connections wisely
If you like this article, see others like it: