- We have talked about building your presentations,
about going from framework to outline
to designing your perfect slides.
And now we're going to take you through the process
of practicing and delivering your talk.
- Your connection with the audience,
it's probably the most important component.
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- I don't know how many times I've gone to a talk
and afterward, someone will be like,
oh, so what did they talk about?
I'm like, oh, God, I don't actually know.
Fundamentally, I think a good talk is really clear.
Like it's conveying their scientific message
in a way that I can remember.
This is the talk that I saw
and here's the cool science that I learned.
A good talk is one
where you're with the person the whole time.
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- I think of my scientific talks
as conversations with my audience.
Talking about your excitement.
Talking about your failures.
- Jokes, anecdotes, you can joke about
all the experimental design mistakes you've made.
People like hearing that you're human.
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- I like to ask questions of my audience throughout a talk.
Sometimes I ask questions to kind of perk their attention.
Sometimes I ask questions to see, are they following me?
Are they understanding?
And I not only pay attention to the verbal responses,
but I also pay attention to their nonverbal cues.
Are you with me?
Is everything clear?
Mm (clicking tongue).
Is there something that I can make clearer?
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- I try and do a little bit of jargon checking
no matter who I'm speaking to.
- Jargon refers to the technical terms
that scientists from a certain field use.
And these terms are not understandable for scientists
from a different field, for example.
- So when I first started graduate school,
I was at a happy hour with a whole bunch
of other graduate students from economics, social sciences,
all these other fields that I didn't really know at all.
And they just kept talking about theories,
about super wicked problems, and Foucalt.
- Mm (tongue clicking).
- Later on, I went to the library and looked up
what they were talking about.
I realized they weren't talking about
anything all that technical or complicated.
They were talking about
why society has some basic systematic problems.
And if we had just sort of started
with that kind of language,
then I feel like I would have had something to contribute.
And I certainly would have understood what was going on.
If I'm gonna use a really technical term,
I'll always ask myself, is this necessary?
- Say that you're talking about a gene that you're studying.
Sometimes you can't avoid using the name of that gene,
but then really explain why that is important.
What that gene is.
What that gene does.
Making sure that people have
all of the information available
so that they can follow your talk.
- Some of the best speakers and lecturers
that I've ever seen were able to communicate what they did
to an audience of their peers,
but also, like, their kids in elementary school.
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- Repetition is a really good technique
to remind your audience the bigger picture.
You know, why you're doing the research that you're doing.
What are the broader implications?
- When I was an undergrad,
Carolyn Bertozzi had been invited out to speak.
She was well known.
She was just like, I had read her papers.
And so I was really excited to see it.
And I was just blown away
by her ability to give an amazing talk.
And one of the things that was very clear to me
was the fact that she'd actually repeated
her sort of core message throughout like,
at the beginning, the middle, and the end.
And so, unless you had been asleep,
there was no way you could miss her take home.
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- Using analogies is the art of using comparison
in order to clarify a complex scientific process.
- We had a very talented, young scientist
give a talk about her basic research project,
how cells can sense pheromones from other yeast cells.
It's called gradient tracking,
which is a bit of a jargon-y term.
- Your friend is baking cookies.
Now you've never been in his house before,
so you don't know where the kitchen is.
But you can smell the cookies baking.
So the first thing you're gonna do
is walk in and you're gonna sniff (sniffing),
and you're gonna sniff (sniffing).
And you're gonna go in the direction
where there's more cookie smell.
So it turns out that the sperm and the white blood cells
do exactly the same thing.
- Analogies can be incredibly helpful,
but they can also be tricky.
Try it out on people
and make sure that people understand it.
See if using that particular analogy
really conveys the idea about your research
that you want it to convey.
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- So if I'm sitting in the audience,
the talks that most appeal to me
the speaker is engaging with the audience.
- Talk to them, instead of talk at them.
- This will help your audience be more engaged
with what you're telling them.
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