My PhD supervisor left me

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This post is of a more personal nature than most, but I would still like to write about this. Last September I took a course called ‘Achieving your goals and performing more successfully in your PhD‘ (a serious contender for the longest-course-name-ever-awards). Among other things, the course had us thinking of potential threats to getting our PhD-degree in the given time. The first thing that came to my mind was the thought of my supervisor leaving me. And guess what, that totally happened: my PhD supervisor left me!

Past

I met my supervisor, Charl Botha, in my second year of my Computer Science studies. I was torn between wanting to become a game developer (because I was gaming so much) and doing something with my medical background, so my three years of hospital work wouldn’t go to waste. I made an appointment with him and he showed me some of the medical visualization projects he was working on with his PhD-students at the time. I was amazed by the beautiful images and the implications of this research for patient’s lives. From that moment on it was clear, no more game development dreams for me and a full focus on medical visualization.

Later on, Charl became my supervisor for my BSc-project ‘Computer-Assisted Surgical Anatomy Mapping (CASAM)‘ in collaboration with the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. Good times were had by all in this group project and my medvis passion grew stronger. In my MSc curriculum, things really became interesting in the Data Visualization and Medical Visualization courses. When it was MSc-thesis time, Charl once again supervised me. I had never really considered doing a PhD before, but the medvis field, cool projects and Charl by then had convinced me otherwise. So exactly one year ago, I started my PhD, with Charl as my daily supervisor for the third time.

Present

The first year of my PhD was pretty much smooth sailing. Implementing, publications, conferences, project meetings: everything was going exactly like I hoped it would. That is, until November, where the dreaded ‘We need to talk’-conversation happened. Of course I fully understand his reasons and respect his decision, but for me personally, this news hit me like an arrow to the knees (here’s what that looked like ;) ). He was still around for one day a week for a couple of months, but last week I had my last project meeting ever with him.

Future

Since he’s leaving academia entirely, there’s no chance of following him to another university and my only other option is to quit my PhD: do not want! Why is this such a big deal for me anyway? I guess I accepted the PhD-position under the assumption that I would be able to continue my work under his supervision. This news of course isn’t the end of the world and in time I will have a new advisor. Until then however, I will be a bit of a PhD orphan. This could potentially be a good thing and a chance for me to work more independently, but at the same time this thought also scares me. If there’s one thing I like to do at times like this, it’s planning. My plan for now:

  • I’ll just keep going with my research and will try to stick to the research plan as well as I can. I wrote this document just before Charl left and now is a good time to keep the future vision for the project and milestones in mind. The alternative, quitting, is really not an option for me. I love this project far too much for that.
  • Since I won’t be having weekly progress meetings for a while, my lab journal is even more important to maintain. I won’t be able to discuss my progress, but at least I’ll keep myself accountable in that way.
  • I’ll ask others for feedback when needed. Just because I’m supervisor-less for now, doesn’t mean I am completely on my own. I still have my lovely co-workers, project partners and doctoral advisor when I need feedback on my work or writing.

I would like to thank my ex-supervisor for all the inspiration, motivation, advice, teaching and his relentless enthusiasm. I wish him all the best in future endeavors.

What’s it like to be a PhD-student?

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This weekend one of the students that is working on a MSc-thesis project related to my project asked me: ‘What’s it like to be a PhD-student?’. While there is no clear-cut answer for this and this probably varies wildly between fields, countries and departments, I would still like to reflect on my own experiences in this post. I am now officially one year into my PhD (out of four here in the Netherlands) and this is what it’s been like so far:

Working it

So what do you do as a PhD-student? Research obviously, but what does this mean? It roughly works as follows: You start off with either cool idea or work from an existing problem. Once you’ve got a clearer vision of the approach to solve this, you search for what has been done already and read the existing relevant publications on the subject. If what you had in mind has been done already, it’s either back to the drawing board or thinking of suitable extensions to existing work. Now it’s time to formulate your contributions. What is it that your work will bring to the table that is novel and why is this interesting and useful? When you’ve ironed out these details, it’s time to start working it!

PhD Research: The Eternal Cycle

PhD Research: The Eternal Cycle

How exactly this happens will depend on your field, in the hard sciences it will be experiments for instance while in a field like computer science it’s typically implementing your ideas. Once you have results you need to publish them, so you start writing your scientific paper for either a conference or a journal. Once you submit this, scientific peers review your work and you get feedback from them along with the decision to accept or reject your work. Whatever the outcome, you will have received information to polish your work. Once published, the full cycle starts again from the beginning with a new topic: rinse and repeat! After a couple of these iterations, you write a thesis that either consists of your publications all wrapped up together in a nice package or something written from scratch. In the end you defend your PhD in front of a committee and then your life as a PhD-student is officially over.

So what are the everyday activities involved? For me it’s reading, implementing, writing,  presenting, assisting in teaching, supervising students and drinking a lot of tea. The ratio of these varies based on the current phase of your research (the tea drinking is pretty much a constant though).

Benefits

So why would you be interested in doing a PhD? The obvious answer to this might seem to get a PhD-degree, but for me personally this was not at all my motivation. There are some benefits to a job like this that you’d be hard-pressed to find in other jobs:

  • If you find a cool PhD-project you love, you will have the pleasure of working on this exclusively for four years. In a further academic career you’d also have to worry about funding and in a business setting you’d have to worry about profits.
  • Financial stability: the luxury of a fixed contract for four years (in the Netherlands) is a clear benefit in this difficult economy.
  • You get to meet many new and interesting people from different cultures and get to travel to international conferences and places you might never visit otherwise.
  • While you may have obtained a master’s degree, the learning doesn’t have to stop. There are research schools that offer advanced courses on the topics you love and during the long and arduous journey, you’ll also learn a lot about yourself.

This concludes my short summary of PhD-life. Of course this is just my take on things and it does not necessarily represent the views of others. If you ask me what the main requirement is for doing a PhD is though, I would answer: ‘Endurance. In enduring, grow strong.’

Preparing for a Scientific Meeting for PhD Students

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The noble art of preparing for a scientific meeting is perhaps not the most exciting skill in your career, but fruitful meetings are definitely an important component of a successful PhD project. This week I flew to Leeds to visit the Virtual Pathology team with my medical project partners. So, an anatomist, a surgeon and a pathologist walk into a meeting room… This doesn’t sound like the start of a great joke, so I’ll stop myself right there. What I would like to discuss in this blog post however are some tips for having successful meetings. In your PhD there will be many meetings to be had, so you might as well make the most of them. Of course there are several types of meetings: the regular meetings with your supervisory team to discuss your progress and plans, meetings with your project partners to discuss project progress and then there are meetings with other scientists to discuss the possibilities for collaborations.

Almost Again

Whatever the occasion of the meeting, always make sure you are prepared:

  • Consider the goal of this meeting and prepare accordingly. For instance, if this is a progress meeting, make sure you have an overview of what happened since the last meeting.
  • Take note of who else will be attending the meeting. If you know this will be a crowd of medical researchers, it would be in your best interest to keep your ultra-technical detailed software geekery thoughts to yourself. Focus instead on how you can add value to their work and how they can add value to yours.
  • Prepare a short presentation. Even if this isn’t asked of you, make sure you have one ready anyway. When the opportunity knocks to show and discuss your work, don’t let it pass you by or catch you by surprise. In time you’ll have a good repertoire of recent presentations to Frankenstein from, so this shouldn’t take too much effort.
  • If you’re doing a live demo, make very sure everything is in working order on your laptop and do your demo a couple of times beforehand to iron out the kinks.
  • If there are specific things you’d like to discuss in the upcoming meeting, make a list of these to bring to the meeting.
  • If this is a recurring meeting, check your minutes or notes of the last meeting.
  • If you’re the one organizing the meeting, you can consider making an agenda to mail around to participants beforehand as well as date/time/location reminders.

We Ride

When the time has come to have the meeting, there’s a couple of things you can do to be an active participant:

  • Dress appropriately for the type of meeting you’re having.
  • If you’re able to listen and write at the same time, please take notes. Whether you prefer a laptop or the good old pen and paper for this is up to you, but taking notes helps you to focus and provides you with a tangible summary after the meeting.
  • Pay attention to what is discussed and add to the discussion when you have something to contribute.
  • If you’re in charge of the meeting, try and keep it concise. No one is served by having meetings drag on for hours: the participants will lose their energy and interest and there is a steady decline in productivity. If more discussion is required, make an appointment for a follow-up meeting instead.
  • At the end of the meeting, discuss what the next required action steps are for each of the participants are and, if required, pick a date, time and location for the next meeting.

Aftermath

After the meeting is all wrapped up, take some time to process the information:

  • Now would be a good time to read the notes you made and turn these into minutes of your meeting. Bob Laramee has written a great protocol that works well for most regular meetings. Depending on the type of meeting, other participants may or may not appreciate being sent your minutes, so use your judgement on whether this is required or appreciated.
  • From your notes, distill your TODO items and enter them into your task management system.
  • Archive your meeting minutes and notes for future reference.

p.s.: Please excuse the long blogging hiatus, there’s a perfectly valid reason though that involves sitting next to a hospital bed for the better part of last month.

HabitRPG Review – Achievement Unlocked: Gamification Done Right!

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I’ve been playing around with HabitRPG for a little over a month now, so as promised: my HabitRPG review! My initial impressions and description can be found in my previous post, but this post is a more in-depth review after a month of use. I backed the Kickstarter shortly after trying it out for a while and there have been a lot of updates since (not only due to my contribution, I’m sure ;) ). The creator, Tyler Renelle, is obviously very passionate about HabitRPG and it really shows. Here’s my rundown of the things I love and the things I’m not too happy with. Let’s start with a short visual tour:

Love:

  • It really feels extra rewarding to complete real-life tasks when using HabitRPG and this provides you with a little extra motivation.
  • History statistics are kept for all tasks so that you can look for trends in your behavior.
  • New features are introduced regularly. This past few weeks pets, the ability to create a user profile for instance and avatar customization were introduced. Yes, I’m a girl now!
  • There will be iPhone and Android apps soon as the Kickstarter was successfully funded.
  • From a technological perspective, I really have a soft spot for the chosen technologies and applications. This guy is using awesome things like MongoDB, github and Trello (for planned features, you can even vote there!) and I love it!
  • They are not trying to re-invent the To-Do-list-management-wheel and there is planned integration with existing task managers like Remember The Milk, Google Tasks and Evernote (my fingers are crossed for Astrid).

Meh:

  • As is the case with many new projects, there’s still a lot of bugs and server load issues to be ironed out. This typically shows up as ‘unable to connect’ messages and sometimes the game can’t be accessed at all.
  • No social media integration or friends functionality yet, it would be great to provide some extra motivation.
  • Using HabitRPG alongside your existing task management techniques gives you extra overhead and bookkeeping to do.
  • I’m not sure how well this would work for non-gamers at all. Then again, it doesn’t need to be for everyone.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed using HabitRPG a lot and will continue to use it after this month. I really feel the gamification aspects give me an extra reward as I complete tasks in real life. I love how well it works for both personal habits like eating healthy food as well as for work-related activities like getting tasks done. I can honestly say I’ve eaten more fruit last month due to HabitRPG and enjoyed completing Pomodoros more, because they will give me more gold and experience points. The things I didn’t like so much are mostly currently being worked on. I unfortunately can’t speculate on if such a system would be helpful to non-gamers at all.

Will it work for you? There’s really no way of finding out other than trying it out for a while. You have so much to gain (experience and gold) and almost nothing to lose (health)! If you do give it a try, I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comment section. Updates on the project can be found on the official HabitRPG blog.

Scientific Presentation Pro Tips Part 2: The Presentation

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A while ago I wrote the first part of a series of posts on scientific presentation tips to present your research in a memorable and interesting way. In part 1, I described the preparation process, now it’s time for the actual presentation giving: what to do, what to wear and other convenient tips.

Presentation Day – What to Wear

So you wake up on the day of the presentation. If you’ve prepared well, you don’t have to worry about your slides and things like this anymore, so just do your typical morning routine. There is one thing you should be thinking about at this point though. What should I wear? There are several things to keep in mind when selecting a proper outfit. First of all, what is everyone else wearing? This depends on the occasion, whether it’s a conference with peers of your field, a meeting with the people that fund your project or a small meeting of your research group. If you don’t know what other people will be wearing, ask someone that does. While this might seem like a weird question to ask (be sure not to phrase it in a ‘…. So what are you wearing?’-type of way), it sure beats showing up to an all-suit meeting in shorts and a t-shirt. The aim of this question is to pick something appropriate that doesn’t make you stand out in a bad way, where people will talk behind your back about your outfit. If you do like standing out, but want to do it in a good way, consider picking a nice color accent that suits you. A second thing to keep in mind is, what makes me feel good and confident in this situation? I personally really get into presentation mode when I wear some killer heels and dress quite formally, but everyone will have their own preferences. There’s a range of acceptable outfits for every occasion, so you’re free to pick the one closest to your own preference. In short: when selecting your outfit keep the occasion and personal taste in mind.

Getting in the Zone

If there are other presentations before yours, do not use this time to work on your own presentation some more. The time for preparation is over and it looks much more professional and is more respectful towards the other speakers to focus your attention on their talks. So pay attention to being an attentive audience member, focus on the story the current presenter is presenting and let them know you’re listening by making eye-contact and nodding occasionally.

Right before you present your work, you can do a couple of things to get into presentation mode. If you’re nervous or tense before, pay special attention to your breathing. Make sure you breathe from your belly and not the top of your lungs. Relax your shoulders and get ready to give a great presentation. It’s not a problem to have a bit of healthy tension before you start to present, but it shouldn’t get in the way of your speaking. When it’s time to give your presentation, ground yourself. Grounding yourself in this context is the act of making a connection between your body and mind and keeping yourself in the moment. It’s quite easy to do quickly by focusing on the feeling of your feet on the ground, then feeling the muscles in your leg, straightening your back, lowering your shoulders and arching them back and stretching your neck to hold your head up straight.

During your presentation

When you are ready to give your talk, be mindful of the current situation you’re in. Do not get lost in thinking about what your next slide will say or feelings like ‘Let’s get this over with so I can leave.’. It’s better to focus on the content you’re currently presenting and the delivery of that content to the audience. Be in the moment and even try to enjoy this interaction between you and the audience, even though it feels a bit ‘one-way’, you’re taking the audience along the awesome story that is your presentation, so enjoy that privilege of having their attention and this opportunity to give this talk. Be sure to make a connection with the audience, by giving them the attention they deserve. When presenting, it’s easy and less intimidating to just talk to inanimate objects like the wall or an invisible friend right in front of you. When you do this though, the audience will feel you’re not addressing them and that your content is maybe not even important for them. In essence you’re giving them a free pass to zone out as they please.

To keep your audience enthralled, try to make a connection with every single one of the people listening by making direct eye-contact with them (real eye-contact, not looking somewhere above the eyes or pretending to look, people will actually notice!). When you are really addressing your audience instead of delivering your content into thin air, people will have a much harder time zoning out.

Bonus Tips

There are some things that you can do to make your presentation to go from great to really amazing. Here are some simple, but highly effective tips:

  • Powerful pauses. A dramatic pause between you introducing yourself and the actual content can really build tension. A pause between different content sections can emphasize also heighten audience attention and makes it easier to follow your presentation.
  • Speaking speed. Always remember that the audience needs to listen and think about your words while you talk, so speak a little slower to give them time to follow along. Of course too slow will have them fall asleep, but speaking too fast happens more often.
  • Feelings. Spice up the presentation by delivering your content with a certain feeling that matches the content. This one is admittedly hard, but extremely effective. Try to present your introduction in a welcoming way, your problem in a more dramatic way, your method in an interesting way and your conclusion in a convincing way for instance.
  • Movement. Add some more visual interest to your presentation by using gestures to further emphasise your points. Or walk a bit during a sentence, stop before an important point, pause, and deliver your point while standing still (the old walk-stop-pause).

Answering Questions

After your talk, people will typically have the opportunity to ask questions. If you have a rough idea of what questions will come up after your talk, it looks really professional to have a couple of slides with extra information available. You can store them after the end of the presentation and once a question like that comes up, you can quickly bring them up. There are several types of questions you might get, so be ready to handle these:

  • Content questions:
    • These are real questions that people ask simply because they want to know.
    • Typically fun to answer and not too hard, so take your time to answer them well. If you feel it would take too long to explain though and it wouldn’t be interesting to other audience members, offer to take it offline (talk in private later) or refer them to a specific part of your work.
    • Example: ‘Could you explain to me how this component of your approach works in more detail?’
  • Philosophical questions:
    • These are less directly related to your work and more related to topics open to discussion.
    • Can be fun, but can also seem a bit off-topic. If you think it will lead to a great discussion, feel free to engage, but again make sure that it doesn’t go on for too long if there’s no agreement in sight.
    • Example: ‘Do you think there is added value to 3D displays over 2D ones in all perceptual tasks?’
  • Show-off questions:
    • These questions serve no other purpose than showing off the knowledge of the question-asker to the rest of the audience. These questions typically are low on actual question-content, but very rich in technological buzzwords.
    • Keep it short, but sweet. Getting into highly technical stuff only to allow the other person to showcase his knowledge is not what you are here for.
    • Example: ‘You mentioned rendering, will you be using Path Tracing, Bidirectional Path Tracing, or Metropolis light transport, but also semi realistic methods, like Whitted Style Ray Tracing, or hybrids?’
  • Trolling questions:
    • Some men just want to watch the world burn and you in it. Others just want to bring you down to make themselves feel better. Sometimes these people are even in your audience asking questions with an aggressive undertone, blatantly attacking your work.
    • ‘Don’t feed the trolls!’ kind of applies here (unfortunately you can’t pretend you didn’t hear them though…). The quickest way out of it is not to launch a full-scale counter-attack, but to remain polite, composed and elegant. Point out that you’re taking their comment into consideration (say something like ‘thank you for your remark, I’ll look into it’) and keep your answer as short as humanly possible.
    • Example: ‘You’ve just presented work which I have already published in 1983 in Nature and in Science, so I don’t see how your work is relevant and also my method was better and more elegant than yours. Can you comment on this?’

This concludes the second part of my scientific presentation pro tips. I hope this was useful and that you are delivering awesome presentations already. If you’re still new to giving presentations, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day and getting really good at things requires tons of practice. Once again, if you have any more scientific presentation tips or questions, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Inbox Zero Redux: reduce e-mail overload like a boss

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I thought it would be nice to discuss one of the ‘golden oldies’ of e-mail overload countering here: Inbox Zero and my modifications to Inbox Zero Redux. It’s been a while since this approach was introduced by Merlin Mann (an e-mail wizard name if I’ve ever heard one), 7 years already, but I still try to get my inbox to zero e-mails daily. And actually succeed most of the times. It might be a different story if suddenly start receiving hundreds of e-mails every day, but for now, this is working well for me.

The basic options presented for every e-mail in the Inbox Zero methodology are: delete, delegate, respond, defer and do (video here). In this day and age, with e-mail storage space availability as it is today, I’d like to replace the delete option with archive. Archiving gets e-mails out of your inbox and your mind fast, but when needed, a quick search can bring them up quickly again. To adapt Inbox Zero to my personal taste, I’ve modified Inbox Zero to Inbox Zero Redux. My personal e-mail options actually consist of:

  • Archive: if no action/response is required from you, archive immediately.
  • Reply: if you need to reply and it will take you less than 3 minutes, do it now. Follow this up with a nice archive obviously.
  • Action: if an e-mail requires action from you, keep it in your inbox! That’s right, my inbox is a crucial part of my current to-do list. As soon as you’ve taken the action, reply if needed and archive afterwards.
  • Star: reserved for special cases, where e-mails are really important to you, but require no immediate action or response.

I’m not sure if this is noticeable at all, but the first three options on this list are actually kind of like a stack. The height of the action stack required for every e-mail can only be decided by you. The highest action stack consists of an action-reply-archive sequence and will only be necessary for important e-mails. The second highest stack, reply-archive, occurs more frequently, but typically can be dealt with quick and painlessly. The lowest stack, which should be your option of preference, consists of quickly skimming over the e-mail and archiving immediately. The star action, I admit it’s debatable if this is actually necessary at all, is a way of keeping things that feel important close without having them in your inbox. Periodically I skim over my starred list and unstar the mails that are no longer relevant.

My Inbox Zero: Redux approach: Action Reply Archive

My Inbox Zero: Redux approach: Action – Reply – Archive

So this is the mindset I have along with this system: nothing (ok, almost nothing) gives me more pleasure than having an empty inbox. Mails in my inbox are costing me precious mental energy by drawing my attention to them every time I look at my inbox (which is more often than I should). New e-mails should be processed as quickly as possible and the only way this will happen is deciding on the lowest possible e-mail stack height and following through with it. Summarizing that again: archive whenever you can, reply immediately when a reply is necessary and if action from your side is required, keep it in your inbox until you can perform the action. I work through my inbox to-do list because my mindset gives me a reward for completing tasks (getting closer to empty inbox bliss) and punishes me for keeping things on my to-do list for too long (by having them stare at me from my inbox). Don’t believe me? Oh, here’s my inbox now:

What's that? Ohhh the sweet sound of Inbox Zero-induced bliss...

What’s that? Ohhh the sweet sound of Inbox Zero-induced bliss…

Here’s some more general e-mail tips I condensed from Inbox Zero and my own experiences:

  • Use templates or canned responses for basic e-mails like thank-you notes if you find yourself typing the same type of e-mails over and over again.
  • If it’s been a while since the e-mail was sent, asking the sender if it’s still relevant can save you a lot of time.
  • If an e-mail has been sitting in your inbox for a brutally long time, either answer it now or delete/archive it already.
  • The rule I can never follow because I have a serious e-mail addiction problem: don’t check your e-mail continuously or have notifications when new mail arrives.
  • For every e-mail ask yourself: What’s it to me? Is there anything required from my side? How can I handle this in the most elegant and quickest way possible?

Apparently there’s an Inbox Zero book scheduled to be released at some point as well. But for now I’ll stick to my own Inbox Zero-inspired e-mail ninja routine: archive-reply-action(-star).

Scientific Presentation Pro Tips Part 1: The Preparation

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In this post I’d like to give you some scientific presentation tips to present your research well. Over the years as a student and now PhD candidate I’ve given many a presentation and had many a course on giving good presentations. In my first couple of presentations I was a complete nervous wreck and could barely breathe, later on this ‘evolved’ into smiling during the entire presentation combined with (bad) improvisational jokes and now I can even state I actually look forward to preparing and giving presentations. I’d have to say the course I’ve learnt the most from was definitely ‘The Art of Presenting Science’ by the awesome Gijs Meeusen and his team, so some of the tips I’m writing about, I picked up there. I cannot recommend this course enough, so do try and take it somewhere if you’re able to. If you’re not, I believe Veronika will do a nice write up about this course at some point (edit: She did and it’s glorious! Check it out here!) . This post will describe phase one in the presentation giving process: the preparation. Whether you’re presenting for your research group, at a conference or elsewhere, always be prepared :)

The Preparation

Here’s a typical preparation situation that I experienced more often than I care to admit. One day before your presentation you start realizing it’s probably a good time to prepare your presentation. So you fire up the old Powerpoint, make some slides, preferably by harvesting content from whatever slides you already have laying around and Frankensteining them together into a monstrous new presentation that potentially fills the time allotted to you properly. Read those once or twice and you’re done! During your talk you are as surprised by the slides and their order as the audience is, making for a great and lasting impression on your audience members. Here’s tip number one: stop doing that!

The following approach takes more time, but makes for way better presentations. Start working on your presentation as early as you can. Even if you have presented the same material elsewhere before, you’ll probably have a new audience to address this time. Always keep your audience in mind, using questions like: Who are these people? What do they want from this presentation? What is relevant and interesting to them? What is their knowledge level?. Keep the other speakers (if any) in mind as well, what are they presenting? Make sure you don’t present the same thing or are able to somehow relate the topics in your presentation. Now take a closer look at the content of the topic you want to present: What is the problem I’m solving? Why should the audience care? What do I want the audience to take home from this? How can I explain this in the clearest way possible? Once you’ve answered all of this, then and only then, you can start to think about making slides.

Presentation Paths

Once you’re ready for the next step in your preparation, think about the approach you’re going to take. The way I see it, there are basically two paths before you. The first path consists of a well-explored completely straight highway that most scientists take. It involves structuring your presentation in the way millions have done before you: overview, introduction, related work, method, results, future work, conclusion and discussion or a small variation on this theme. The reason this road is used so often is that it works and is an easy structure to use. It is also really clear to the audience and they will completely expect everything that is presented to them. This is also the major drawback of this path, it has the potential to completely bore audience members out of their minds in a quick and orderly fashion, causing them to zone out and think about what they’ll be having for dinner later.

The road less traveled consists of a muddy trail through a dark mountain forest, with twists and turns, steep climbs and descents. This path involves presenting your scientific work as an actual story, including all the traditional storytelling ingredients. All good stories have certain key phases in common (here’s an example). To do this, you have to rethink your scientific work and fit it to these phases appropriately. This is challenging, but if done correctly makes for very interesting presentations that will keep audience members absolutely enthralled throughout the presentation. It can feel like quite the risk to stray from the traditional path of presenting scientific work, but the rewards if successful are also greater: the audience will be attentive, drawn into your story and will remember your presentation, your message and you. The major drawback here as that you really need to make sure your presentation doesn’t become too chaotic and that everything is explained very well, because if you lose them at some point it can be quite tough to jump back into the story.

Slides and Sensibility

I’m sure we’ve all seen some bad presentation slides at some point in our lives, slides that contain oodles of unreadable text, bullet point items that aren’t really related to each other, meaningless, but complicated looking graphs and in that same category: slides full of complicated math that serves no purpose other than impressing the audience. That’s not how we roll of course, but I still have some tips for creating slides that will support your story rather than distract and bore the audience away from it:

  • Keep them simple: don’t write out everything you plan to say or you’ll have audience members reading that instead of listening to you and becoming bored with you and your wall of text quite quickly. Just a couple of keyword summaries is really all you need.
  • Images/videos > text: pretty pictures do speak a thousand words (or more). When appropriate use strong imagery to support what you are saying instead of text. In my field of computer scientists, I always like including some surgical pictures to keep them on their toes ;)
  • Slide-speed: get to know your personal presentation slide-speed. What I mean by this is how long you present per slide. I know that I typically take 1 minute per slide (rather fast), so if I need to give a 15 minute presentation, I’ll need to prepare 15 good slides.
  • If you need math in there, make sure to introduce it slowly and clearly. Be gentle, because the wall of math is an even faster route to audience zoning out than the wall of text is.
Audience member's brain on mathematical equation slides: 'Hmmm.... Lasagna or stir-fried vegetables with rice?'

Audience member’s brain on mathematical equation slides: ‘Hmmm…. Lasagna or stir-fried vegetables with rice?’

Rehearsal

The final phase of a good preparation involves rehearsing your presentation. Everyone has their own personal preference for this. Some people like to rehearse out loud beforehand for instance. If I do this my presentation will come out robotic and scripted, lacking in spontaneity and emotion, so I never do. I do have mental rehearsal sessions though. I just sit (or stand ;) ) behind my pc start up the presentation (and time it) and present the work in my thoughts. I pay special attention to the transitions between slides (I’m not talking about the animations, just the content switches) to make sure I have a smooth verbal bridge between them. The first time you’ll do this, note the parts where you trip up and take care of them. This mental rehearsal makes sure I don’t throw out anything too random during the actual presentation, because I’ve had the opportunity to let these surface during rehearsal. It also reduces the chance of getting stuck at any point in your presentation.

This concludes part 1 of my scientific presentation tips. In part 2 I’ll get into the actual presentation giving, which is (after a good preparation) the fun part :) If you have any personal scientific presentation tips, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.