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I am an experienced academic passionate about inspiring individuals to aim high. I have assisted multiple students and early career academics to achieve their goals.
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I am an experienced academic passionate about inspiring individuals to aim high. I have assisted multiple students and early career academics to achieve their goals.
As an undergraduate student, I was never very confident delivering presentations. Yet I had to do them as an assessed component in several modules I was studying as part of my course. Presentations are still a common and essential feature of most undergraduate and postgraduate courses as they are an essential part of many professional occupations. Since starting my academic career in 2004, I have assessed numerous student presentations, I have sat on interview panels for PhDs and academic jobs, and I have also observed many conference papers and other presentations in a variety of academic and non-academic contexts. I have also personally delivered presentations myself in interviews for academic jobs as well as multiple lectures, workshops, seminars and conference papers. Decades of experience has led me to conclude that if you want to be successful in delivering an effective academic presentation you need to consider three things:
Just as in any assignment, preparation is essential. The first thing to recognize when you’re doing a presentation is that what the people listening to your presentation want to hear is the depth of your knowledge and understanding. They want to understand things in a detailed perspective from you, so you need to make sure that you do the reading and research required to show them that. Reading and research are important for a presentation. Examples to support your points, citations from literature and from sources that you find are vital to support everything that you have to say. You need examples to be clear, real life and specific as possible.
The structure is also important when you come to creating your presentation slides. The structure needs to be clear and logical. Just like in an essay, you need to make sure you have an introduction, a middle part and a conclusion at the end. You may also need a slide or two listing your citations. In the middle part, it’s important to make sure that you emphasise the main points you want to focus on, using clear examples. You must also ensure the argument that you want to get across overall is as clear as possible throughout the presentation. Just like in an essay, your argument needs to come across in the introduction, a few times in the middle and then summarised in the conclusion of your presentation.
When it comes to preparing your slides using MS PowerPoint or similar, make sure that each slide contains as few words as possible and lots of visuals, such as: images, pictures, diagrams, graphs, figures and statistics. Also consider using a short video to highlight a particularly important point or example. It is also worth considering using animations to make your slide show as engaging as possible. It is essential that you spend as much time as possible designing and editing your slides so that they look lively and engaging but not too busy with information. What you want when you do a presentation is for people to be gripped by what you’re saying all the time, at every point, so it’s good not to ever have a dull moment and to make sure there’s always something lively for your audience to look at while they listen to you.
As part of the preparation stage, it’s important to consider the questions that the audience might ask you. Make sure that you do enough in-depth research and reading to enable you to answer questions. It’s important to recognize that the audience/assessor are not interested in your personal view necessarily, but they’re interested in what the research says, the background to what you’re saying and how much do you really know about your subject. After you’ve done your preparation, including all your reading and research, and you’ve created your slides to be as engaging as possible, the next stage is to make sure that you do some good rehearsal.
Unfortunately, in my experience students often skip this bit or they do it far too quickly. But rehearsal is important to ensuring success in executing your presentation on the day. The more rehearsal you can do the better. You need to do rehearsal without an audience just to yourself first and make sure you edit your presentation on your own. But it also helps to have a mock audience, and you need to ask that audience to give you honest feedback on things that work and things that don’t work in your presentation.
Don’t get people to be part of your mock audience who are just going to say “it was great”, “it was fine”. Often friends and family will do this to be kind, but you need people to be ruthless! Try to get people that are going to be critical and will give you a hard time. Other students who you don’t know so well and academic staff are usually the best for a mock audience. It’s best to have a mock audience who are going to ask you questions and who have at least some knowledge of the topic that you’re speaking about in your presentation. If there are particular questions you think you are likely to be asked you could plant those questions amongst members of your mock audience and then practice the answers that you give to those questions. It’s important when you’re rehearsing to time yourself and make sure you stick to the time limit that you’ve been allocated. There’s almost always a time limit that’s set upon you, so you need to not only ensure you’re not going to go over it but also that your presentation is not going to be too far short of the time limit. Both are not desirable and can cost you marks! When you’re rehearsing it’s essential to explain your points slowly so that they’re very clear. That’s another reason why it’s good to have a critical mock audience or at least someone else to tell you: “Actually that wasn’t very clear” or “that was too quick”.
Don’t rely on the information that’s on your slides when you’re rehearsing. Instead, use them to trigger your memory as to what you need to say. The idea of rehearsal is that you’re trying to memorize important things that you’re going to say, and all those things shouldn’t be on the slides because if they are you’ll be forced to read from them. Simply reading from the slides is rarely favourable as it demonstrates little depth to your knowledge and understanding of your topic. If you’ve spent time preparing and rehearsing your presentation, the final aspect to ensure you consider is executing it on the day.
Good execution of a presentation, regardless of the context, is all about confidence. If you know you’ve spent the time preparing and rehearsing you can be ultra confident, and you don’t need to worry when the big day comes! I would suggest arriving early for your presentation, familiarise yourself with the room and audience and make sure you’ve got your slides and everything you need ready before the time comes for you to present. That’ll give you confidence and help reduce stress.
Make sure when you’re delivering your presentation that you face your audience at all times and avoid looking at the slides too often. I would encourage you to avoid using notes or cue cards because reading from them or from your slides highlights a lack of confidence and implies a lack of knowledge, understanding, preparation and rehearsal on your part. What your audience want to see, and the message you want to convey, is that you’re the expert in whatever it is you’re speaking about on that day. Make sure that you maintain eye contact and that you have absolute confidence in the preparation and rehearsal that you’ve done.
When asked questions at the end of your presentation it’s important to stop and think before you answer. If the question is very long and convoluted it might be an idea to ask the person who asked it to rephrase it because you don’t understand it. This will give you more time to consider your answer. It’s important when you’re answering questions not to just go off the top of your head but try as hard as possible to recall information you’ve read, important studies, theories, evidence and examples that you’ve found in your research. This demonstrates the depth of your knowledge, understanding, preparation and rehearsal too.
If you do all these things, you can be sure that you’re going to deliver an excellent presentation!
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