Academia friends, this week I’m discussing scientific conference talks and posters with my graduate student course.
What are your top tips for how to give a good conference talk or a good poster presentation, how to design your slides or poster, or what not to do? 🧪
- bottom line up front slide
- declarative slide titles
- less text, bigger fonts
- no, even bigger, seriously
- accessible for all
- don’t ever say I know you can’t read this but
- never ever go over time
- tell a story, start wide, narrow in, end wide
- use the mic every time
- end with takeaways
Conferences are mostly insufferable because senior researchers think they can break the above rules- they can’t. If you go over time at a conference you are bad
Also-
- if you know the answer to your research question, don’t make your presentation (or paper) title end with a question mark
A Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) slide is commonly used in the government & military. It’s a summary of the most important takeaways for high level decision-makers in the beginning of a briefing. In the government, a Principal might arrive late or have to leave early. Tell them what they need to know.
Declarative slide titles are a final-boss tier presentation hack. Most of the time, your first bullet on the slide can get moved to the title of that slide. Gives folks the message you want to convey. And cuts text.
❌ Methods
✅ Compared Federal Investments Across Census Tracts to Assess Equity
Exactly. One of my most valuable lessons from 20 years in management consulting. A partner was known for dismissing a slide deck if he couldn’t slide a stack of print-outs and just read the headers to get the points that was being made.
Important: Be sure to include a verb.
Draft a script that you would deliver if you only had a microphone and nothing else. Then identify which visuals would be helpful. Put those on slides.
USE THE MIC EVERY TIME
No, no matter how well you think you project, it’s easier to hear you and, more importantly, easier to focus on what you’re saying, if you use the microphone.
Assume there’s someone in your audience with hearing difficulty, …because there probably is.
Yes
Yes!
YES!
If you “share your deck afterwards” and the recipient can present from it without you, it’s got WAY TOO MUCH INFO WRITTEN IN IT.
Less text.
Bigger fonts.
Really!
+ Don’t try to make your deck stand on its own. It’s should support your presentation.
I’ve started politely refusing to share my deck when people ask for this reason.
Agreed. We used to have a separate research product at RAND, called a documented briefing. Basically could be a stand alone product without a person presenting it. I liked the format. www.rand.org/pubs/documen...
- tell people at the start what the presentation will be about, "in this presentation I will do three things...."
- embrace the banal
- no, really, embrace the banal. The people in the know will get what you are saying anyway, but the randos need the big spoon.
And never ever ever ever ever make slides you will read to me as your delivery. I’m literate and can read for myself. If you have nothing important to add to the slides, we don’t need you there.
Yes!! I scrolled through hoping someone would make this exact point. I've attended far too many sessions where the presenter read the slides to the audience. 🤬
Speaking only for myself, if a scientific talk doesn't have at least one equation or figure I feel like was shown too briefly/want to revisit later, then what was the point?
A huge huge help at pycon this weekend was having a big QR code at the start and end of the presentation that goes to a page with links to all the cool tools. Doesn’t need to have the slide deck. Let me focus on the presentation instead of scrambling to note the names packages and tools
People ignore the importance of story-telling. Really simple things like 'before, during and after', characters and conflicts.
I can't count the number of talks I've seen that start with data without establishing a story arc. A good practice: data goes in last.
I think there's a trap so many of us fall into: "I have these cool looking figures, how do I stitch them together?"
When we should be asking: "I have this cool story to tell, what figures best support it?"
We were just talking about this in my lab! My feedback to labmates:
Titles of slides = main take-away point for the people who aren't listening/paying attention. I'm also a fan of bullet point summaries of important points, not sentences.
If you're going to a larger conference with a lot of subfields, it's important to ask "will the people who study [not your niche work] understand what I'm saying?"
Our interdisciplinary institute has an internal conference. I ask people "will the cardiac and cancer people follow this (neuro work)?"
Practice all talks (poster or otherwise) with scientists who aren't intimately familiar with your work. It'll quickly tell you if you're using too much jargon, if you're missing anything big, etc. My PhD friends in other fields practice on me a lot.
Be accessible!! Especially for something like a poster, be mindful of things like colours so folks who are colourblind can still follow your work. So many online resources about this speak to it much better than me.
Take a small notebook or something so you can make notes. Jot down questions or ideas from people, network and get their info, etc.--much easier to write it down in the moment/immediately after so you don't forget later!
Also helpful for actually following up, esp if you say you're going to.
Smaller thing, but important to me, as a former lab manager: don't forget to acknowledge the people who helped with the work. It's easy to add your lab techs/RAs to your acknowledgements slide in a talk, especially if they made your analysis possible through recruitment, running tests, etc.
Yes!
And if you don't understand the question, don't be afraid to rephrase/ask it in your own words to make sure you know what you're answering. It'll provide clarity and buy you time to formulate your answer.
Great advice. Everything you're saying in this thread applies, I venture to say, across all meetings where presentations are given. I'm thinking of "kickoff meetings" with TV networks and Zoom presentations by my daughter's school, to name two very non-scientific situations.
Thank you, and yes! Absolutely applicable in many situations. I've been (separately) trained in science communication and public speaking over the years. Even though these things seem straightforward, I try to be mindful that a lot of people don't know or forget to consider them 🙂
Tell the audience what you think is cool about what you did. They can read about the technical details or ask you later, but your talk will be more interesting if you’re excited to share what you found.
+1
Your enthusiasm will get people to listen to what you're saying and remember it. I've been to talks where the speaker didn't sound super excited and those are the hardest to pay attention to
This is so true. My work's subject matter is not exciting to anyone but I love it and people always tell me they enjoyed learning about it because of my enthusiasm for it. I feel the same when I listen to a presented who is engaged with what they are saying and the audience.
I'm no longer in academia, but I still think this is true: Your audience knows less of the background than you think. Give more context, gloss more abbreviations, spell out things that you and your mentors take for granted.
- Fewer words! Whenever possible make a figure to convey your point instead
- start w/why they should care & end w/why they should care
- be yourself, genuine, conversational
-posters != papers. Don't make them be read. Treat them like slides for a talk where all the slides are showing at once
*don't make them TO be read
Which brings me to my most important piece of advice. LOOK over your poster after it prints!! I once had a labmate have to present a poster where all of their figures were big red X's b/c of file conversion issues and they hasn't looked at it before the conference 😬🤦♀️
