Embedded in Academia

In a week you’ll be giving a talk about your work to 300 smart people at a conference. Or perhaps to 5 people who will approve, or not, your PhD topic. Or even to 30 people who will soon decide whether or not to offer you a job. Depending on your area and the type of talk, the questions following the talk may not be friendly. What should you do? Practice, practice, practice.

The “practice talk” is usually given to a small audience anywhere between a few weeks and a few hours before an important talk. It is followed by a session of criticism, helpful advice, etc. that can easily last five times longer than the talk itself did. Often, multiple practice talks are necessary before the material and its presentation converges to an acceptable form.

The problem we’ll address here is getting maximum benefit from a practice talk. This is important because they are very time consuming for the audience: most people won’t be very excited to attend more than one (although students may have to since they’ll be up next…). The following guidelines can help make efficient use of time.

The speaker must:

• Have a legible slide number on every slide. Let me say that again. HAVE A LEGIBLE SLIDE NUMBER ON EVERY SLIDE.
• Reserve a room, acquire a projector, and have everything setup and ready to go at the arranged time. This shouldn’t need mentioning but I’ve seen some truly outrageous screwing around with A/V equipment and PowerPoint prior to a practice talk. If anyone is calling in remotely, this should also be taken care of by the speaker or by someone who has agreed to help the speaker. It is important to respect your audience’s time (busy professors like me are perfectly willing to walk out of a practice talk when setup appears to be taking too long).
• Have practiced the talk alone first. If you don’t do this we can tell.
• Have an appropriate number of slides. Speakers vary widely in terms of delivery speed and amount of content per slide, but 1.5 minutes per slide is probably about right. At the conference (and at the practice talk too!) you will be cut off if you exceed your time budget. At proposals and defenses there is not a strict time budget, but going way too long is disrespectful of the audience.
• Have a pen and paper available to take notes after the talk. You cannot remember 150 detailed suggestions about things to change.
• Arrange for someone to time the talk. Sometimes it is helpful to get timings on individual slides.
• Act on the feedback that is given. There’s a special place in Hell for people who give a practice talk, absorb a huge amount of feedback, and then give a nearly unchanged talk a few days later.

Each member of the audience must:

• Listen to the talk as if it were being given for real. Interrupting the speaker, etc., should be handled according to whatever protocol that will be in force during the real talk. Generally this means few or no interruptions.
• Arrive with a pen and paper, or equivalent note-taking gear.
• Turn off his/her cell phone.
• Provide detailed feedback in a constructive and respectful fashion.

In my group this is usually the procedure:

1. I try to give a bit of context: remind everyone what the speaker needs to accomplish, what kind of background and temperament the audience is likely to have, etc.
2. I introduce the speaker.
3. The talk is given, minimizing interruptions to get a good timing estimate.
4. Starting with students, the audience asks questions as if they had just heard the real version of the talk. The speaker responds accordingly.
5. Starting with students, the audience makes general comments about the delivery of the talk.
6. We go through the talk slide by slide, giving feedback and trying to figure out what to add, delete, change around, etc. This part takes approximately forever.

I wrote this up because it seems like all six of my PhD students are simultaneously going through their first conference talks and/or thesis proposals. But hopefully it’s generally useful.