Physics 210
Project Proposal 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 6-8 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.
- Because the purpose of this exercise is to obtain
helpful feedback and suggestions on your proposal,
ask for it at the end of your talk,
and invite questions.
(If you want to give A TRULY TERRIBLE TALK, here are some
GUIDELINES.)
Nota bene:
My apologies for not noticing earlier that this page had not been updated
since 2008, when the instructions (to a much smaller class!) were to send
your presentation files to me.
That is not what you should be doing this year!
Instead, you should put the PowerPoint (.ppt)
or Portable Document Format (.pdf)
file*
for your presentation in your own ~/public_html/p210/
directory on hyper, make sure it is world-readable,
and then enter both a title (topic) and the
URL (of the form
http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~yourID/p210/yourfile.pdf)
at the bottom of the
Presentation Schedule page.
It will be easy to tell if it worked: you should then be able to
click on the title and the talk file will open in your browser
or the appropriate application on your computer.
This must be done by 08:30 AM on the day of your talk.
*In principle, files in
OpenOffice (.odp or .sxi) format
will work just as well on our workstations, but as a courtesy to
those who still only have Windows, we ask that you convert to
either .ppt or .pdf format.
Jess H. Brewer
-
Last modified: Wed Oct 13 21:01:01 PDT 2010