Effective Scientific Presentations: Guiding Principles, Study notes of Physical Chemistry

Download Effective Scientific Presentations: Guiding Principles and more Study notes Physical Chemistry in PDF only on Docsity! Tips For Giving a Scientific Presentation Good oral presentation skills are vital to a career in the chemical sciences as well as many other fields. What ever you do when you graduate from the University odds are that you will be required to make oral presentations as part of your job. In the industrial community such presentations offer a quick synopsis of proposals and progress reports. A lousy five minute presentation, can spoil weeks of work preparing written materials. Similarly, in academia, the ability to clearly convey scientific information in an oral presentation is critical to both teaching and research. While there are no strict rules about how to give an effective presentation, there are some guiding principles. This hand-out will attempt to provide an overview of these principles in helping you prepare a better talk. These will be covered in greater detail in the pages that follow, but here is the main idea behind each. 1. Know the audience. This is vital to an effective presentation. If you were giving a talk about a particular experiment, it is critical to know how much the audience knows about the technique. You would not give the same presentation to a group of marketing representatives as you would to a group of scientific researchers. Your talk must be geared to inform. This leads up to our next guideline 2. Clarity, clarity, clarity. You are trying to convey information to the audience. What may seem perfectly obvious to you may be baffling to them. Presentation style and materials must be easy to understand and make a clear point. Concerning visual aids, what you can read perfectly clearly on a transparency may be too tiny to see when viewed from the back of the room. 3. Practice makes perfect. Nothing makes for a worse presentation than the actual presentation being the very first time you have ever gone through and given the talk. A good presentation should have a flow to it. It should move smoothly from one point to the next. You want the audience to be focussed on the materials and not your fumbling. A corollary to this rule is rehearsed is boring. 4. People might be sleeping. Have you ever been to a scientific talk? Boring! Well it certainly can be. All lectures, scientific or otherwise, have the possibility of being sleep inducing. Keep this in mind as you prepare your lecture. Try to avoid the pitfalls that can lead to a comatose audience. 5. What do you mean it’s not compatible? In this day gadgetry and computer toys, overhead projectors are headed the way of the dinosaur. However, never has an overhead failed to project a transparency because it was version 6.03 and it can only use versions up to 5.01. If you use a laptop and projection system be sure everything is compatible (software, hardware, cables, etc…). And bring a backup just in case. Principle 1 KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE Your talk needs to convey information to the audience. It is therefore imperative that you know who your audience is. Here are few examples. Lets say you were going to give a talk about the effectiveness of detergents at removing a particular compound from a liquid mixture. You are going to give this talk to two audiences. A group of research scientists and a group of second graders. Clearly, things would not go well if you started the talk to the researchers with, “Who knows what soap is? Has anyone ever used soap? Soap makes us clean by picking up the dirt and allowing it be carried away by the water!…” Equally the second graders would not appreciate “The effectiveness of the surfactant compound can be determined by the noted decrease in the measured surface tension of the model system…” Here are few guiding principle to keep in mind 1. Know the purpose of the talk. By knowing why you are giving the talk you learn a lot about the audience. For example, if you were asked to teach a group of second graders about soap you would know they have little or no background. You’d need to cover a lot of basic material, give examples, etc…If you were going to give a talk for TA’s and students for your CH 154 class, you would know the purpose of your talk was to see if you understood the material in a particular lab. Therefore, even though the audience might know all about the experiment, you should explain it to them. This demonstrates your mastery and may teach them a thing or two. 2. Don’t talk over their heads, don’t make them want to smack you. This cannot be emphasized enough. Don’t patronize people to the point that they want to leap out of their seats and slap you across the face. There is a fine balance between giving people background material so that they will understand your talk and talking down to people (2nd graders included). On the other hand, don’t assume that people understand and skip the introductory material. You’ll need to decide at what level to cover things and strike a balance between complexity of the talk and clarity. -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 1.75 2.00 2.25 2.50 2.75 3.00 1/T x 103 -lnK slope = ∆rH°/R = -9500 Reaction Enthalpy of Silver Carbonate Decomposion Determined from van't Hoff Plot Reaction is endothermic ∆rH° = 75 kJ mol-1 Ag2CO3 (s) Ag2O (s) + CO2 (g) Improved Viewgraph Heading Conclusion showing point of viewgraph clear data points axis labels main information from plot Reactant (T1) Reactant (T2) Product (T2) Product (T1) ∆Hreactants ∆Hproducts ∆H(T1) ∆H(T2) Cal (T1) Cal (T2) ∆Hadiabatic = 0 Cal (T1) Cal (T2)+ + + + ∆HA = ∆H(T1) + ∆Hproducts = 0 ∆HA = ∆H(T2) + ∆Hreactants = 0 ∆H(T1) = -∆Hproducts = -[Cpproducts + Cpcal](T2-T1) ∆Hreaction = ∆Ureaction + RTΣνg adiabatic wall bombO2stirrer thermometer water bath ignition wires reactants UNCLEAR (way too much info) calorimeter at constant V no PV work measures change in U not H Need calorimeter constant Calibrate with known substance usually benzoic acid find heats of formation Enthalphy is a state function therefore changes are path independent you want the enthalphy of the reaction. T changing! Use calorimeter CLEAR (need more viewgraphs for other info) adiabatic wall bomb O2stirrer thermometer water bath ignition wires reactants Reactants are burned with excess oxygen gas Reaction takes place in a sealed bomb imersed in a water bath Whole apparatus is in an insulated box Temperature rise in water must be due to the heat of reaction 5. Keep the audience listening. Last but not least is the principle that “This is a scientific talk, not a murder mystery.” Don’t hold back all you data/conclusions to the end hoping to drop it like a bomb and surprise everyone. While it might seem like a good idea to “wow them” at the end of the talk. This fails miserable if they are all asleep. Tell people what you did up front and they will have a better chance of following you through your talk. If they know where you’re going they are more likely to come along for the ride. Principle 5 WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S NOT COMPATIBLE? Larry and Janice each spent many long hours at their computers working on two presentations that they were giving. The people hosting the talks told them that they would have a laptop and projector setup and that all they would need to do is bring a Zip disk with the presentation. The first three presenters gave nice presentations using overhead transparencies. Larry was pleased that he would blow everyone away with his multimedia extravaganza using the computer and LCD projector. When his turn arrived he walked to the front with his presentation on his 250 MB Zip disk. Much to his horror the Zip on the laptop was a 100 MB Zip. What were these people living in the stone age? After much ranting and raving he said he had planned for such an emergency and he had brought his 250 MB drive with him. He went back to get his stuff and after much rummaging he brought back the drive. What, no USB port on this laptop? More ancient technology! No problem someone upstairs had a computer with a 100 MB internal drive and a USB port. They decided to proceed with another talk while Larry dealt with the transfer to a 100 MB Zip. After ten minutes Larry triumphantly returned with the disk in hand. They loaded it into the laptop and he double clicked on the presentation. A nasty error message came up. Larry had used Powerpoint 2000, and the laptop has Powerpoint 98! Much cursing. Again Larry heads upstairs to search the building for someone with Office 2000 so he can save his presentation in the older format. While he is gone Janice gives her talk. She has a 100 MB Zip disk and her presentation is in Powerpoint 98. Beautiful graphics, a bit of animation, clear presentation. Wonderful all around. Larry finally returns to hear the thunderous ovations for Janice’s lecture. He has the disk with the presentation. Unfortunately, there were several error messages about converting his copious animation to the older format. His 20 MB movie intro may be lost. He plows ahead. He start the presentation. The intro movie starts to load and then crashes. He re- boots the computer. Nothing. The laptop now has serious problems that no one has time to deal with. Janice asks if he has backup transparencies. No, he only has the one disk. Larry’s presentation is cancelled. After the last lecture Larry turns to Janice and asks “How did you have all the right formats? You had the right disk, the right program. You’ve even got a Mac and the PC laptop didn’t trip you up!” Janice replies that she simply asked what the equipment would be. She saved the presentation in a format that would work and used a PC formatted 100 MB Zip disk. She also noted that she had brought transparencies as a back up in case there had been some catastrophic failure. Rules to live by: 1. Bring your own equipment and make sure it works. Since rule 1 is usually not possible, rule 2. 2. If you use anything from anyone else (projector, laptop, etc…) make sure it is compatible. This includes problems with OS, cables, software versions, etc… Lastly, 3. If you are truly paranoid, bring transparencies as a backup.