- You are really excited
about the research that you're doing,
and so you wanna share that.
How do you share that in a way that's effective,
and in a way in which you feel confident and comfortable?
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- The main purpose of giving a scientific talk
is sharing information.
- Something you've discovered,
or something that is important about what you've done.
- To share a new area of biology,
to share new experiments, to share new data.
- Communicating something about new knowledge
that you've generated.
- Connect to your audience,
and make them inspired to do something,
to contact you,
to collaborate, to hire you, to seek you out as a mentor.
- You want them to leave the room
and still have that in the back of their heads.
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- When I was a younger and more naïve graduate student,
I thought giving a talk was about
throwing information together on a slide,
standing up, saying the words, and that was it.
And there's so much more that goes into giving a good talk.
- The speaker has built a talk that is addressing
the audience that they're speaking in front of.
They've built their talk
to fit within the time that they have,
they're not rushing, but they're also not slow.
Their slides are very clear,
so their slides are an addition to their talk,
as opposed to something distracting or confusing.
It really, for me, is a lot about clarity.
- To be able to talk in front of an audience,
and really give people an idea
of what your thought process was,
the things that you tried that didn't work,
or the things that you were thinking might be the case,
those are things that really bring a talk to life.
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- No one gets to being able to give good talks
without a lot of work.
This is not some
secret, amazing ability
that only a certain number of people have,
it's actually a skill, it's something you can learn,
it's something you can work on.
People who do it really well are people who work at it.
- This course is gonna take
the big idea of a talk, nebulous idea of a talk,
and break it down into distinct units.
So it's digestible, it's allowing you
to sort of wrap your head around this,
and then build and build and build,
and then be able to step back at the end
and say, "Wow, that's the whole."
- We are walking you through
the whole process of giving a talk,
from what happens before, how do you prepare for that,
how do you reflect on what you wanna say,
how you wanna say it, who you're speaking to,
and then we're going to walk you through
the practical stuff,
like how do you go from having
a goal, a message, and an audience defined,
how do you go from that abstract information
to actually making slides?
- How do you decide what data
to put into the body of your talk?
What do you want to put into your introduction,
how to structure your introduction,
how much information you should be conveying,
all the way to how you should be thinking
about ending your presentation.
And then we also give a lot of advice and strategy
on slide design and best practices.
- Then there's also the delivery.
So how do you think about how you're delivering,
your personal style,
how do you deal with the nerves
that come with having to give a presentation?
- What happens during the Q&A?
How do you prepare for that?
We're also going to talk about the importance of practice.
We're going to walk you through the whole process,
so by the end of the scores,
hopefully you're going to feel ready
to conquer that research talk.
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What we've tried to do
is really include the different perspectives.
People who are scientists,
and are now professional science communicators,
people who are still working in research.
- It's important to see these many different ideas
from a diversity of speakers,
and people from a diversity of backgrounds.
- There's no one size fits all.
Ultimately, a talk is an individual expression.
No two talks are alike, no two speakers are alike.
What strategies do you hear that are useful to you,
and which strategies do you hear
that you might not have thought of,
or that you will wanna discard?
- What we are trying to do here
is to give you that shortcut.
We want to tell you all of our secrets
in order to make you a better speaker.
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