Tips for an Awesome Academic Presentation

Hi to everyone who is reading this post. I hope that you care a lot about the way you want to present, and because of that, you are here.

In this post, I write about how to present appropriately in academia to keep people listening to what you are presenting. I learned this way when I was a master’s student. I listed the following rules for making a good presentation. Note that I do not claim it is the best way, but it is effective.

1. Keep your slide simple but not plain. I mean don’t use the “white” template of Microsoft’s PowerPoint. It is better to use a template like what you can see here from Prof. Onur Mutlu (If you can detect and follow the rules he respects in his presentations, you will approach what is called an awesome presentation. Most of what this post tries to accomplish)

2. Talk about the background shortly, in which the main focus is on counting the problems because it is needed to start from somewhere. Don’t talk about everything, try to narrow it down to the problems and the solution. Try to mention the problems that the proposed mechanism is supposed to address. In other words, make a concise story to mention those problems. It is better to use animations for highlighting each problem at the end of each slide (red color would be really helpful). Mention the proposed mechanism with a short high-level description of it, which tries to address the problems, and the total improvement results.

3. Mention the key idea explicitly. After talking about the problems try to give an overall view of what you are going to talk about. Highlight it by using animations (red color would be helpful). Usually before mentioning the “key idea” you should show some experimental results.

4. Build the story of the solution. After talking about the key idea, try to speak in a way that you are narrating a story. Don’t jump into the mechanism promptly, it will make it unfathomable for the audience. Continue the story by talking about the goals of the approach concerning the observations (experiments) and previous research work. Try to make it modular to be much easier to grasp. Never forget how much time you spent on doing this work (or if you are presenting a paper, the time you spent understanding it), and don’t expect the audience to get it fast. If needed highlight something with the help of animations and reddish colors.

5. Don’t overwhelm the audience with all of what you have done. You do not need to show all of your figures (or all of the figures in the paper you read). Think clearly about what you should show to convince the audience that the proposed mechanism works.

6. Talk about the related works briefly, and differentiate your work (or the paper you read) from the previous work clearly (make it clear what is the relation of your work to them: improvement (the proposed mechanism is better) or orthogonal (it can be applied with that mechanism to the overall system)). Just add more information for illumination if you see that is needed.

7. Finish your presentation by highlighting the problems, key idea, and proposed approach name, and the total improvement results.

8. Think about what questions might be asked by the audience for a better understanding of the problems, key idea, proposed mechanism, or subsections of the proposed mechanism. Provide extra slides after the “Thank you for your attention! Questions?” slide to show them on demand.

Another good practice is using slide numbers in your presentation slides. Put the total number of slides after a dash or slash character besides the slide number. It relieves the audience. They will have a sense of how much you are going to present and when the presentation will conclude.

I hope that it will be helpful for those who care about how they present.