August 20, 2024
Avoid these mistakes when presenting in your master's
Do you want to get better grades for your presentations? Or do you want to impress your research group? Then this guide's for you. I've graded dozens of Master student presentations, and some feedback points come up repeatedly. In this blog, I share all my tips for your presentations at university and show you how I would improve my own master’s thesis defence slides.
The outline:
- The four parts you need to know to improve your presentations:
Rule number 1: Do not assume your audience knows everything you know – you studied this subject, so you will probably know more about it than everyone else!
The students I teach and supervise have to do three types of presentations:
- Presenting in courses: 10-ish minute presentations about a research project or a paper
- Presenting in a research group: 20-minute presentations about your thesis research (an introduction, update or practice for your defence)
- Presenting your thesis: the 20-minute presentation to defend your thesis.
The most important difference between these three types of presentation is the audience. Who your audience is, as well as what they know and what they care about, is your starting point for crafting any form of communication.
For course presentations, your audience is other students in the course. Keep in mind what they know and don't know. Your peers will know lecture materials but not specific datasets or network architectures. A common mistake is that people repeat names or acronyms of methods only they are familiar with. Take the time to introduce all the new techniques or find a simpler way to talk about them.
Presentations in your research group (during your thesis research) are opportunities to practice presenting for scientists. Your goal is to treat these presentations as practice runs for presenting at conferences. Your supervisors will know your topic very well, but the other PhD students, Post-Docs and professors in the group won't. They are your audience: scientists who are familiar with your field but not with the specific topic. So, think carefully about what they may or may not know, and give the other group members enough context to understand your research problem.
Finally, your thesis defence should be understandable to all graduating master's students who took similar courses. Though your research group and other master's students are very different audiences, in practice, if your research group presentation is good, your defence will be, too.
Rule number 2: Make it easy to listen to you
The content of your presentation is what you choose to talk about. Your goal is to make it as easy as possible for your audience to follow the content. A common mistake I see is that people try to tell too much. But the result is that the audience remembers nothing at all! So, try this instead: aim to make people curious.
To make your audience curious, you need to motivate your topic: why would the audience be interested? Give enough background to make the audience care, but not so much they get distracted.
Removing all irrelevant information is very important for a coherent and engaging presentation. The easiest way to do this is to craft a single take-home message, for instance, "Adding weather information improves crowd flow prediction in setting xyz." Then, make sure everything you say supports that message. Remove all the details that don't help.
Rule number 3: The time your audience spends mentally processing your slides is time not spent listening to what you say.
Even when we publish lists of tips before presentations, students keep losing a lot of points on simple slide mistakes that can be avoided. Many people are tempted to think:
- Adding more information will make me seem more knowledgeable
- Adding more details doesn't hurt
- Using images means I only need a few images
But all these assumptions are wrong!
Less is more
Your slides, as your content, should be minimal and focused on relaying your key message. Every bit of information you add that doesn't help you actively work against you. You'll need to fight the text-heavy slide for your audience's attention. Very busy slides can completely overwhelm your audience, even if your words are clear. Here are some things you should leave out:
- Title slide fluff: You don't need the date and venue; everybody knows where they are.
- The table of contents slide: we all know the structure of scientific presentations. Explaining that you'll discuss the problem, methods, results, and conclusion for a minute wastes your and the audience's time.
- Backup slides: some people like to put extra results or references on backup slides. Backup slides are good places to put references and detailed text when your slides are meant to be shared, like how teachers share their lecture slides. They're never meant to be shown during the presentation or Q&A. So, you never need these slides in your master's. Skip them.
- Pseudocode and formulas: only show them if you take the time to explain them line by line. In most cases, it's unnecessary, or you don't have the time.
- Q&A or thank-you slide: slide real-estate is money. The Q&A slide is a wasted opportunity to direct the audience towards the questions you want to hear and are prepared to answer. Instead, make a conclusion slide with your key points and an interesting image to start a good discussion.
- Text: Don't leave text out altogether, but remove as much as you can. Many of the slide decks I see are 80% text. Most of these text slides don't help your audience understand your message; images are much more powerful. Flip your mindset: only use text if you cannot express your message using visuals. For instance, all my slides are now visual, with text for the title and annotations.
Respect the medium
Another common mistake is simply copying things into your slides without changing them. Presentations are a different medium, so they need a different treatment. Here are some things you should modify:
- Tables: big tables are impossible to read in the few seconds the audience sees the slide. Make it easier to read by removing all the parts you won't talk about, and use colour-coding or arrows and boxes to show the audience the important part.
- Don't copy-paste figures from papers directly into your slides. The reader of a paper has a lot more time and context to understand complicated figures, but you don't have that luxury in a presentation. You want to make the graphs so intuitive that your audience can understand them in a few seconds. Simplify figures or reproduce them. And don't forget to remove the caption!
- Slide titles: what do the titles "Problem statement", "Methods", or "Results 1" and "Results 2" tell you? Not much… Instead, use the key message of that slide as a title. Replace the "Results 1" and "Results 2" titles with your two most important findings. Read more about this technique here.
It's not just removing
Finally, here are some things students forget to add:
- Title slide acknowledgements: when presenting in your research group or for other researchers, add the names of your supervisors and the logo(s) of your institution(s)
- A footer of the format: "Your last name et al. Short title", so people who come in late still know what the presentation is about
- Slide numbers: makes it much easier to ask questions about specific parts of the presentation.
Example: improving my master's thesis defence slides
Let’s clarify these points and improve a slide deck from my master’s thesis defence (Read more about my master’s thesis here, and read the paper here). I selected slides illustrating the points above. I lowered the opacity to make the notes stand out more. Improvements are annotated in orange; good elements are in pink.
Rule number 4: Many presentation mistakes are avoidable if you practice.
The final component of good presentations is your delivery. Delivery is how you speak, use body language, interact with the slides, and manage time. While students don't lose a lot of points on this, there's a very easy way to improve your delivery: it's practice!
As a student, I was guilty of not practising. I could improvise the presentation well if I prepared the content and slides. But that made me miss out because of a few reasons:
- Practising your presentation aloud helps you find gaps in your story or reasoning.
- Practicing makes you more confident.
- Practising helps you explain complex concepts or images.
- Practising helps you stick to time limits!
Here are some more tips for delivering a strong performance:
- Guide your audience through the slides, especially if they have complicated visuals. So, if you show a chart, don't forget to explain what it shows, what the axes mean, and which conclusion the audience should draw.
- Timing: sticking to the time limit shows you respect the audience's time and your expertise in crafting the message. Going over time a lot makes the audience feel awkward or annoyed. On the other hand, if your presentation is much too short, it can impact your grade (if you don't cover all the required components).
- If you get tight on time, resolve your timing problems quietly. Don't tell your audience, "I don't have time for this". Act as if it was all on purpose :)
This blog covered how to avoid common mistakes in master's presentations. Here are some more resources if you love presenting and want to learn more:
- Podcast: How to present science - Marloes ten Kate
- Free email course: Prep your talk - Duncan Yellowlees
- Blog about public speaking: Six minutes
Finally, don't hesitate to contact me if any of these are unclear or if you have tips to add to the list.
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