thesis presentation tips

Your thesis or dissertation defence is the culmination of your years of hard work. What can you do to make it a big success? Preparation Go to defences: The best way to find out what happens in a defence is to make a point of going to several defences before your own. You will likely feel much more comfortable and assured when you see the best and worst that can happen, and take note of examples to emulate and to avoid. Timing: For our department, plan your presentation to run about 20-25 minutes, 30 min. max! Remember, the presentation is primarily for the benefit of the Examination Committee, not for additional people who may wander in to listen--it's not a public lecture!--and the Exam Committee will all have read your thesis. They don't need or want an exhaustive description. Contributions: Don't be modest; be clear on your contributions! If someone asks, Why should you get a degree?, how will you justify yourself? I've been here 2 years won't cut it. Slides: Turn on slide numbering. This makes it easy for viewers to jot them down and then say, Please go back to slide 23. With PowerPoint you can press 2-3-Enter and zap right to the given number. Avoid using acronyms on the slides without defining them. Some presenters successfully put the spelled-out version elsewhere on the same slide in small font, so people who don't know the acronym can see the meaning, while not distracting from the main points. Identify slides that you can afford to skip over if you see time is getting tight. Some Exam Chairs will cut you off, so don't assume you can talk forever. Think of some expected questions and prepare some extra slides to answer them (the dry run really helps for this, see next point). Rehearsal: Do a dry run with faculty and grad students from your research group. Pay attention to their suggestions for improvement, but realize that you can't please everyone and.
Presentations  for a faculty or disciplinary audience are subtly different to those you give at a conference, but not talked about as frequently. These ‘internal’ presentations are important because they tell your colleagues what kind of researcher you are; it helps you socially and academically to perform well to your peers. This topic occurred to me as I sat in on a couple of examinations (vivas), completion seminars and a confirmation or two in recent weeks. I have sat through literally hundreds of assessment presentations if you count my years in purgatory architecture school. So here’s my top five classic research presentation mistakes, but I’m going to stick with the verbal problems here because there are many great presentations about graphics, such as ‘how not to suck at powerpoint’ and ‘how to make you presentation boring’. 1) TMI Too much information (TMI) is the most common mistake I see and one I have indulged in a few times myself. I see it most often in completion seminars where the student has a full draft and can no longer see the forest for the trees. You know that you are heading for TMI when you start to feel like you are drowning in facts and figures which don’t seem to relate to each other. The presentation can seem full of tangents, where the student veers off course to explain, often in painful detail, definitions, counter arguments, collection problems and the like. It’s frustrating to listen to because you feel like the student is never going to get to the point. By the time they actually do, you have lost interest and started thinking earnestly about lunch. A presentation like this is unlikely to make you look like a lightweight, but it can make you look more confused than you are. 2) All theory, no action It’s a difficult line to walk with theory sometimes. Not enough can make your project look lightweight; too much can make it look like.
Defending your thesis can be an intensely nerve-wracking experience. How can you best prepare to face your examiners? Know the format of your thesis defence The format of the defence varies from country to country. Having studied in the UK, my viva-voce defence was essentially an interview with one internal and one external examiner. In other countries it’s common to have public examinations with a whole panel of examiners and an audience of colleagues, family and friends. The first and most obvious tip then is to make sure you know what the format of your exam will be; whether you will have to prepare a presentation and so on. Prepare and practice your presentation If you have to give a presentation, check any time restrictions so you can prepare accordingly. You don’t want to show up with 100 slides for a 15-minute presentation, nor do you want to show up with 10 slides for a 1-hour presentation. The most important thing to do for any presentation is to practice so that; You know the material inside out You know how long it takes You can refine the presentation You can practice on your own and with an audience, and you should do both if possible. Practicing on your own and speaking out loud to an empty room may feel silly, but overcoming that discomfort is good preparation for the discomfort of facing an actual audience. Practicing with an audience of peers is then a good way of getting feedback and finding out what questions people ask. The dreaded “awkward question” Whether you have to give a presentation or not, one of the scariest aspects of the defence is the possibility of being asked a question you can’t answer. It’s tempting to try to read a ton of literature to prepare for this, but since it’s very difficult to predict what the examiners will ask and it’s impossible to read everything, this approach isn’t always effective or reassuring (it might make you.
The last two days I have been examining a lot of master thesis presentations. I also made a cynical Limerick the other week (I admit it wasn’t that good ) on a similar matter, but then for phd students presenting their research results. There are many sources around for general tips and tricks in terms of presentations out there on the internet. With this list I’m trying to give some more master-theses-presentation-related tips-and-tricks (even though some of the bullets will come back to this). 10. Opposing The opposition is a crucial part of any defense of academic results. This means you should put some effort into it. The questions should be intelligent and not only why you wrote “right” instead of “write” on page 104. The opponent should ask the respondent and not the examiner. The examiner is probably not writing the report (we hope). When you present your questions on the slide, don’t turn away from the audience and mumble the question. Talk to the respondent and the audience. Describe your question and what answer you would expect. If the answer is already mentioned – why do you even bother asking the question again? And you, respondent: repeat the question as you think it was for the audience and then answer it. Give a more educated answer than: “I have not looked into that”. 9. Face the audience When you are presenting your work – do not talk to the examiner. Talk to the audience! The examiner already has an idea of what you are working with (we hope). Why state the obvious again for him/her? Observe the audience and note their reactions. How many are playing with their smart phones? If they are playing with their smart phones, interrupt them by bringing up a new hot topic in your presentation. Some more things: Don’t use all abbreviations that people tend to not know. Don’t use phrases like “ we all know ”, etc. 8. Present your results Ok, so this is an.
Well, I’m back. After 3 months of intense thesis writing, revisions, and successfully defending (all while working a part-time job in industry), I want to share with you Part 1 of 3 of this series. Part 2 will be how to finish your thesis in a timely manner (and write a good quality thesis). Part 3 will be life after a PhD, making the transition into the workforce, and how to prepare ahead of time (i.e. apply for jobs before, during, or after writing your thesis). First, what does it take to give a successful PhD Defense? How can you prepare, keep the stress levels low, and make sure you have the highest chance of success? I’ll just say that everyone’s PhD Defense is unique and is unpredictable. Your talk/presentation is only as good as you want it to be. And you cannot fully prepare for all the endless possibility of questions. If you wrote a 200 page thesis, your thesis commitee can pick apart an error bar on a graph on page 133. They can ask you what you meant by a word in a random sentence in any given paragraph. Keep in mind, this is all just apart of the PhD hazing process, and in a sense is just to humble you. At the end of the day, if you wrote a good quality thesis and are CONFIDENT, you should have no problem successfully defending and leaving that room with a sense of relief. Either way, I wanted to share my experience while it is still fresh in my mind 1) Do not underestimate how long it takes to prepare your slides/talk and make sure you give multiple practice talks When I turned in my thesis two weeks ahead of time to my committee, I thought the hard part was over. Although a very important milestone, don’t let your guard down. If you already have most your slides ready to go, then you are lucky. I ended up getting data at the last minute and my story changed. I had to make many model slides from scratch. If you want to give a GOOD thesis talk, you need.
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