Nafisa's Top Ten Tips for Oral and Poster Presentations

This post was written for the Journal of Young Investigators, available here.

1. When using power point, pick a font that is easy to read. I prefer to use Arial.
2. Don’t over crowd your slides or posters with too much text. Pictures, or diagrams can be just as effective.
3. If you include pictures, graphs or other figures make sure they are big enough and don’t use to many.
4. Again, if you do include pictures, graphs, or other figures use them during your presentation. Walk you audience through what the graph, picture, or other figure shows.
5. For oral talk, make an outline of your presentation, this can be your second slide. I find it useful for organizing my talks and I think it helps the audience.
6. Don’t forget to acknowledge the people who helped you with your work and any funding you or your supervisor received for the project.
7. If you have a complicated experimental design with multiple time points, and manipulations make a figure for experimental design like a timeline. It also might be useful to list all the experimental groups you had in your study.
8. Use high contrast colours for text and back ground. Remember some people are colour blind. My default is black text on white back ground with royal blue titles.
9. Practice your presentation and get feedback. Microsoft power point has a great notes section for all slides, write out the points you want to cover and review them before you give your presentation. This applies for poster presentations too. I often have students write out the major points they will cover during their poster presentation. This will help you stay on topic.
10. If you are presenting a poster, have a 4-5 minutes presentation of your poster planned out. Point to figures and graphs. On my posters I like to include a summary of results section prior to the conclusion.

 
Presenting data can be a challenge, in terms of public speaking. I struggled with it when I started my scientific training and still do, but I have been doing it consistently 16 years. It does get easier, I still get nervous, but it is manageable.