Phys5053
Presentation Guidelines
Project
presentations should be limited to a total of 15 min: 10-12 minutes for
the presentation, and 3-5 minutes for questions.
If you are using PowerPoint, make
sure that it will work in class. If you are unsure that your laptop
will work with the class projector, email your presentation to me in
advance.
Practice your presentation several
times. Make sure that you remember what you will talk about, how you
will talk about it, and how you will make transitions between
topics and slides. When designing slides, keep in mind that, in a
typical talk, one slide should remain on for about 1 minute, so a 12
minute presentation can have about 10-12 slides. Make the first slide a
title one.
Your presentation should follow the Introduction-Results-Conclusions structure and should roughy address the following points:
- Why you were doing this? - the scientific problem and interest
- What have you done? - the aspects of the problem that you solved
- How you did it? - the methods that you used
- What have you found? - the results of your analyses
- What your results mean? - the interpretation of your results
If your project deals with issues
that may be unknown to non-specialists in the class, make sure that you
explain them. Try to avoid specialized terminology, or explain it in
simple language.
Make sure that your graphics is large enough to be visible. Use large
fonts. Avoid putting lengthy text in your slides, use key phrases
instead.
As a suggestion, you may address the following aspects:
- how does the data look like? Is it noisy? Are there experimental
artifacts? Can they be cleaned out? What physical processes could have
generated the variables that were measured? What techniques can be
applied to the data of this type?
- did the analysis produce the results that were expected? Were there
problems? Were these problems caused by the type of data that you used
or by the quantity of data? How could the situation be improved?
- If you are estimating any parameters, what are their uncertainties?