Advice for final year PhD presentations

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Advice for final year PhD presentations

• R J Cernik

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This is just advice

• Do it your way

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BasicsIf nothing else your talk should leave the
listeners with the following information

• Who are you?
• What have you done?
• Why did you do it?
• How did you do it?
• Results what did you find out?
• Conclusions so what?

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Who are you?

• Brief introduction
• Describe the group you are working with
• What are the groups aims?
• This should be very brief, less than 1 minute
• Hint, you can show all this with one slide and
  refer to it in a flash

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C. Caso, G. Conforto, A. Gurtu, M.
Aguilar-Benitez, C. Amsler, R.Michael Barnett,
P.R. Burchat, C.D. Carone, O. Dahl, M. Doser, S.
Eidelman, J.L. Feng, M. Goodman, C. Grab, D.E.
Groom, K. Hagiwara, K.G. Hayes, J.J. Hernandez,
K. Hikasa, K. Honscheid, F. James, Michelangelo
L. Mangano, A.V. Manohar, K. Monig, H. Murayama,
K. Nakamura, Keith A. Olive, A. Piepke, M. Roos,
R.H. Schindler, R.E. Shrock, M. Tanabashi, N.A.
Tornqvist, T.G. Trippe, P. Vogel, C.G. Wohl, R.L.
Workman, B. Armstrong, J.L. Casas Serradilla,
B.B. Filimonov, P.S. Gee, S.B. Lugovsky, S.
Mankov, F. Nicholson, K.S. Babu, D. Besson, O.
Biebel, R.N. Cahn, R.L. Crawford, R.H. Dalitz, T.
Damour, K. Desler, R.J. Donahue, D.A. Edwards, J.
Erler, V.V. Ezhela, A. Fasso, W. Fetscher, D.
Froidevaux, T.K. Gaisser, L. Garren, S. Geer,
H.J. Gerber, F.J. Gilman, H.E. Haber, C. Hagmann,
I. Hinchliffe, C.J. Hogan, G. Hohler, J.D.
Jackson, K.F. Johnson, D. Karlen, B. Kayser, K.
Kleinknecht, I.G. Knowles, Christopher F. Kolda,
P.A. Kreitz, P. Langacker, R. Landua, L.
Littenberg, D.M. Manley, J. March-Russell, T.
Nakada, Helen R. Quinn, G. Raffelt, B. Renk, M.T.
Ronan, L.J. Rosenberg, M. Schmitt, D.N. Schramm,
D. Scott, T. Sjostrand, G.F. Smoot, S. Spanier,
M. Srednicki, T. Stanev, M. Suzuki, N.P.
Tkachenko, G. Valencia, K. van Bibber, R. Voss,
L. Wolfenstein, S. Youssef CERN LBL, Berkeley
Genoa U. INFN, Genoa Urbino U. INFN,
Florence Tata Inst. Madrid, CIEMAT Zurich
U. Stanford U., Phys. Dept. William-Mary
Coll. Novosibirsk, IYF UC, Berkeley Argonne
Zurich, ETH KEK, Tsukuba Hillsdale Coll.
Valencia U. Tohoku U. Ohio State U. UC, San
Diego Minnesota U. Caltech, Kellogg Lab
Helsinki U. SLAC SUNY, Stony Brook Virginia
Tech. Serpukhov, IHEP (103 authors listed)
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What have you done?

• Very generally introduce the context of the
  problem
• Explain your role in the work and its relevance
  to the problem

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Why did you do this work?

• Why is this research important?
• Where is it going?
• Why should I care?
• So what?

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How?

• What methods did you chose?
• Why these?
• How did you undertake the work?

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Results

• Briefly describe your results
• Group the results dont give us a blow by blow
  account of every measurement
• Show trends, show correlations
• Dont go overboard with the detail
• If something went wrong say why

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Conclusions

• Spend 5 minutes on these
• What are the main findings from you work?
• Why are these findings relevant or interesting?
• You might have a short time to say what you are
  going to do next

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Questions

• Remember the audience are composed mainly from
  interested parties who are not necessarily
  specialists in your area.
• This is your chance to extract some really
  constructive advice from your peers and academic
  staff present
• This is potentially the part of the presentation
  where you will get the maximum feedback. Dont
  talk over this five minute period.

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General advice

• Relax, this exercise is designed to exchange
  information with your fellow students and members
  of staff.
• It will help you with your research by clarifying
  your ideas and suggesting possibilities for
  future directions.
• It is not a test, there are no pass or fail
  marks.
• Practice your talk in from of a willing
  volunteer. Bribe them if necessary. Its better if
  they are not a material scientist.
• Your talk needs to be understood by scientists
  not necessarily in the same speciality.
• Limit the number of slides to absolutely no more
  than one per minute and avoid the use of Jargon

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Example of a complicated diagram, this takes a
long time to work out what is going on (Eichhorn
et al J Mat Chem 2006)
Figure 5 Compressive stress as determined by
synchrotron x-ray diffraction methods on the
(002), (012), (113) and (231) reflections as a
function of depth penetration.
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Same diagram with better labels and no caption.
Much easier to understand. Get quickly to the
point