Presentation Tips¶
- Presentations are a necessary evil - esp if you want to pursue an academic career
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Require you to put on different hats:
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Advertising: market your work, market yourself, market the lab
- Entertainer: your work should tell a compelling story
- Teacher: what do you want people to walk away knowing that they didn't before
- Networking: get people excited and they will come talk to you! Identify potential reviewers, find new collaborators / colleagues, and future points of contact
- Not high risk: worst case your talk is forgettable
Know the Audience¶
Since we as computational biologists work at the intersection of computer science, biology, and statistics determining the make up of audience is the first step to a giving a successful talk. - Think about the percentages of people from each category that are in the audience
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More homogenous audiences --> more detailed; focus on specific aspects of your projects
- Those most familiar will often be internally (e.g. lab meeting, committee meetings, etc)
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Heterogeneous audiences --> External conferences, the larger the more audience diversity (e.g. RECOMB, ISMB)
- high level - people will be bored by your details
- format as a story - higher engagement and more understanding
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Always assume people will not be paying close attention and try to throw some nuggets in for different audience members
- If you hate giving talks consider applying for ones with a prize and give it your best shot - you can get paid for your pain
CS vs Biology¶
- Biologists will be bored by your algorithm details - ground your project in your applications; how can you help them with their data
- Computer science - need to throw interesting computational bits in for everyone (e.g., theorists want to see some equations, systems people want to know runtimes and speed ups) why are you the hero of biology (why can't biologists solve your problem)
General Links¶
Many other people have good advice about giving successful talks and if you're interested in reading further the following links can serve as a good starting point.