This online workshop is designed for scientists and researchers in the field of natural sciences who want to improve their presentation skills. It covers preparing and conducting convincing, well-structured scientific presentations to small, medium and large audiences (e.g. scientific lab or conference talks but also broader job talks).
You will learn about the three areas of convincing scientific talks:
1. Prepare Clear Content
Many scientific presentations suffer from too little clarity, too much content and too much detail. The result is a lecturer running through the slides, losing the audience at the very beginning. You can learn how to prepare for a great, clear presentation by setting distinct goals, formulating a clear Take Home Message and Main Question, presenting your data in a clear way, and by finding vivid examples and metaphors that make your talk “sticky” and rememberable. Further, you should know how to formulate clear, simple sentences that help your audience understand your main points easily. This leads into an overall story with a dramaturgical structure where your audience really wants to follow you all the way through your talk.
2. Design Proper Slides
Today's leading standard for presenting visuals in scientific presentations is
PowerPoint: a powerful tool, however, often poorly used. Lecturers frequently try
to remind themselves what they wanted to say by reading their own bullets – thereby facing the projection screen instead of their audience. Overly filled, graphically cluttered, visually incoherent slides distract the audience. You will receive helpful guidelines for PowerPoint slide design so that your visuals support you in delivering the essence of your talk.
3. Be Convincing on Stage
Scientific presentations are often characterized by high level, rather complicated content. The art is to communicate this complex content using simple language and sentence structures. Also, good speech modulation, proper use of pauses, and thoughtful opening and closing sentences are essential for delivering your content well. Finally, your body language is extremely important to communicate your content in a successful way. You will learn about the Do’s and Don’ts of body language. After giving short presentations you will receive constructive feedback by your peers and the trainer. This can very well be done in an online setup.
The online workshop is a lively mixture of trainer input and short exercises.
You will receive individual feedback from other participants and the trainer.
This allows you to specify precise areas of individual improvement.
Required Preparation
In order to take part in the course it is required that you send your 3 most important learning goals and a sample of self-designed slides (up to 8 MB) until 2 weeks before the course starts to seminar - aterial@youngscientistsacademy.com – subject “PIERp & [your first and last name]”. They can be selected for presentation during the course, so erase / modify before what should not be seen by others. Prepare for a 3-5-minute presentation. You will conduct this talk in the seminar and receive constructive feedback on your delivery. It can be an excerpt of a former “real talk” with no distinct “start” or “end”. Choose e.g. the first 3 minutes or a part from its body. Please prepare your slides, notes, etc. before, ready for presenting – no additional preparation time in the course. You will present standing in front of your computer, speaking into your camera, seeing your slides and notes on your screen.
Further information follows after registration. This method has been proven to work very well online.
