Last changed 16/12/2011, Todd Huffman
The Graduate Seminar is part of the first year course for graduate students in Particle Physics and is run by Todd Huffman and Laura Corner. It is held during Hilary Term, with an organizing meeting in Michaelmas Term (Thursday 15th December, 10-11, Fisher Room).
The purpose of the seminar is to improve students' abilities to give good short talks, of the sort required in their first year interviews, in parallel sessions at conferences, and in job interviews. A second goal is to learn to give constructive criticism to others on their talks. Both of these are skills they should use in the future, as everyone needs a helpful 'test audience' to suggest improvements to important presentations.
Each student prepares a 10 minute talk. It is given once as a 'practice talk', followed by constructive criticism from the other seminar participants, and later, after improvements have been implemented, as a 'final talk'.
The subject of the talk is freely chosen by the student, usually but not always being on an aspect of their recent research work.
There will also be a brief discussion of the layout for a Poster Session.
An organizing meeting will be held in the last week of Michaelmas term, Thursday 15th December at 10 am in the Fisher room.
We will split into two groups A and B. Students should only go to the practice talks for the group they are in, but should go to all final talks. (This means that for at least half the audience, the presentation will be “fresh” and not influenced by the practice.) It is important that students continue to attend the seminar after they have given their talk, as the constructive criticism to be given to the other students is an important part of the experience.
Please send the title of your talk to Todd
Huffman (t.huffman1@physics.ox.ac.uk)
by Monday 16th January 2012 midday.
|
Group A [Todd Huffman] |
Group B [Laura Corner] |
|
Neven Blaskovic Krajevic
[NBK] |
Abraham Jacob [AJ] |
|
Amy Cottle [AC] |
Scott Lawrie [SL] |
|
Mireia Crispin Ortuzar
[MCO] |
Krishanu Majumdar [KM] |
|
Stephan Dann [SD] |
Katherine Pachal [KP] |
|
Shaun Gupta [SG] |
Thapakron Pulampong [TP] |
|
James Henderson [JH] |
Craig Sawyer [CS] |
|
Donal Hill [DH] |
Scott Stevenson [SS] |
|
Nazim Hussain [NH] |
Henrich von
Jagwitz-Beignitz [HJB] |
The Group A seminar is normally at 11.15 on Thursdays in the Seminar Room (501) of Hilary Term, starting with the first practice talks in week 1. Group B seminars will be on Wednesdays, in the Fisher Room (mostly). The table below shows any changes to the rooms and the dates of the seminars. The 15 minutes between the start and your previous lecture gives you a chance to have a short break, and me a chance to get the projector setup. It would be good if the speakers could come early to help with this process and make sure their talks work.
|
Wednesday [1115-1300] |
Thursday [1115-1300] |
|
Fisher Room |
Room 501 (Seminar Room / Deep Freeze) |
|
|
19/1 TH-A [NH, DH] |
|
25/1 LC-B [HJB, SS] |
26/1 TH-A [JH, SG] |
|
1/2 LC-B [CS, TP] (in Conference Room) |
2/2 TH-A [SD,MCO] |
|
8/2 LC-B [KP,KM] |
9/2 [NH, DH, JH, SG] (in Denis Sciama) |
|
15/2 [HJB,SS,CS,TP] (in Denis Sciama) |
16/2 TH-A [AC, NBK] |
|
22/2 LC-B [SL,AJ] |
|
|
29/2 [SD,MCO,AC,NBK] (in Denis Sciama) |
1/3 [KP,KM,SL,AJ] (in Denis Sciama) |
|
|
|
A data projector and laptop (ours) will be available in the seminar room. Since these laptops are ours, we can't give them to you ahead of time, so please put your talk in the folder \\ppfs5\particle\GraduateSeminar\20112 and we can access it and project it from there. For PowerPoint, it is recommended to do
Tools
-> Options -> Save -> Select: Embed True Type fonts
before saving your talk.
Supervisors and other group members are encouraged to come to the final talks to provide an audience for all of the talks that session.
If you need to change your time, please try to do it by finding another student to swap with, and then let me know.
This schedule is kept on http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/CDF/Mphys/GS.htm.
The Presentation on Presentation can be found on http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/CDF/Mphys/APonPGraduateSpeakingCourse.ppt or
http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/CDF/Mphys/APonP.pdf
Some of these books MAY be useful, but the course does not follow any of them ¬ try to get them second hand if you want to buy them - the first two at least are available in the library
"The Craft of Scientific Presentations" by Michael Alley (Springer) ¬ useful, tips on PowerPoint, and good examples of bad examples!
"A Handbook of Public Speaking for Scientists & Engineers" by Peter Kenny (IoP) ¬ basically sound, but old fashioned and in some cases, wrong (e.g. his recommendation in Part I that you start by writing out the full text of your talk).
“Speaking about Science” by Scott Morgan and Barrett Whitener (CUP) ¬ this is a ¬ “professional” guide to science presentation, with the dreaded “step-by-step” guide to the perfect presentation.
“Presenting Science with Impact” ¬ by Cindy Todoroff (Trifolium) - I quite like this approach, it has little vignettes of presentations that went sadly wrong, and good advice on how to avoid making the same mistake yourself.
“Scientists must Speak” by Eric Walters and Gale Walters (Routledge) ¬ again, somewhat old-fashioned and stuffy ¬ one review on Amazon read “A horrendous book by my former professor...., Mar 11 2003: Upon reading and studying this guide, I wholly expected that it would provide me with knowledge and confidence in presentations. I was unfortunate enough to encounter Dr. Walters as a professor AFTER reading this title, and am appalled at his lecturing skills. One would think that he would take a few hints/pointers from his own text and apply them to his lecturing.
Finally, and with some hesitation, there is
(published in 2010) “Presenting Science: a practical guide to giving a talk” by
Issever and Peach, OUP from the cover “The authors manage to wrap
potentially dry matter into amusing anecdotes and examples. The book will be
especially well received by younger scientists, trying to learn about how to
sell themselves well in talks they are giving throughout the beginning of their
career. But the more senior reader will also find interesting ideas. Thomas Lohse, Humboldt University
· Make sure you stick to the 10 minute time limit.
· For short talks as we give in this seminar, it is best to pick one fairly narrow topic for your talk. Accept the fact that you can't report on all of your work, and concentrate on giving a good report on some part of it. Ask yourself: 'what is the main idea I want the listeners to remember from my talk?'
· Remember that the talk is for the audience's benefit - for them to learn something - not for you to list everything you've done.
· Adapt the level of your talk to the audience - in this case your peers in the Seminar. Don't assume more specialist knowledge of your experiment than you have of theirs.
· A common error is to think that a flood of unintelligible details will impress the audience with how smart you are. This does not work! There are too many people who give bad talks of this type, and you get labelled as someone who can't explain their work. When you have really mastered a complex subject, you are able to see through the details to the real issues.
· Start with an introductory slide, giving title and outline.
· The first slide after that needs to get the audience motivated by being told what you will tell us and why it's interesting.
· The talk should end with a 'conclusions' or 'summary' slide. Again ask yourself: 'what is the main idea I want the listeners to remember from my talk?'
· A good rule of thumb is not more than one slide per minute.
· Use the multi-media effect: what we both see and hear is more likely to be absorbed.
· Don't overload the senses by talking too fast or putting extraneous details on transparencies.
· Talk to the audience, not to the screen.
· Try Arial font or boldface rather than the default, to make it more legible.
· Liven up your slides with colour, especially to highlight the most important parts. Use the same colour to connect related items. Instead of changing the colour of the letters, try using background or underline colour added by hand. But a background colour to the whole slide serves no purpose but to waste ink and make the text harder to read. Beware that background colours made by computer on a transparency tend to be much darker than they appear on your computer screen.
· All writing needs to be large enough to read from the back of the room. This includes axis labels on figures. If your computer makes them too small, replace them by handwritten larger ones or overwriting them in PowerPoint. For tips on making presentable plots with ROOT see http://www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~west/root/plotting_with_style.html .
· Aim to give a better talk than what you typically hear in seminars and conferences. Do not think 'he got away with it so I can too'. When listening to other talks, notice what works and what doesn't.
· Develop a culture among your colleagues of helping each other prepare talks.