Physics 210

Project Presentations

A prized virtue among researchers is the ability to give a good oral presentation in a short time. As you may already know, giving a short talk can often be more difficult than giving a longer speech since you must cover so much in what always seems an inadequate amount of time. Many people imagine that the solution is to speak quickly; however that is the worst possible course of action. Your emphasis should be upon slowly explaining your idea through diagrams, heuristics and (if absolutely necessary) the occasional equation. For reference, here are the key elements that should be considered when designing a 10-12 minute presentation:

Never present long mathematical derivations.
Use diagrams and pictures to explain difficult concepts.
Pace your presentation such that you do not use more than one slide per minute on average.
Slides should not contain a large amount of text. You should provide the explanations - do not read from your slides.
Use titles and labels on every picture and number the equations.
Stay focused upon the take-home message of the presentation.
You have done the work. Now is your chance to brag about it. If you have encountered difficulties, tell us about them only in order to warn us to avoid the same problems; don't apologize for imperfections, we all have plenty of them. This should be an occasion for celebration. Have some fun!

(If you want to give A TRULY TERRIBLE TALK, here are some GUIDELINES.)

Nota bene: All presentation files must be placed in your own ~/public_html/p210/ directory and linked to your Personal Homepage there, no later than the night before you are to give your talk. Do not send them as Email attachments! We accept PowerPoint (.ppt), or Portable Document Format (.pdf) files only. If you like, you can give a link to that URL on the Presentation Schedule page (see the bottom of the Web page).

Jess H. Brewer - Last modified: Tue Aug 31 10:55:30 PDT 2010