A new set of presentation slides is like a program that has never been executed. It probably contains bugs. It reduces the pain for all stakeholders, and most importantly yours, if you test it to discover (and fix) its bugs before exposing it to its audience.
My test process for presentations has three steps. Continue reading “How to Rehearse Your Thesis Presentation”
As part of my roles as a PhD student, thesis supervisor and post-doc, I have literally listened to more than five hundred presentations. Unfortunately, many were very bad, making them an uncomfortable experience for both the presenter and the audience.
Over the years, I have made it a habit of asking speakers (both of good and bad presentations) whether they did a presentation rehearsal. Almost all good ones did. Without exceptions, all bad ones did not. From my experience, preparation in general and rehearsal in particular, are the most important factors influencing thesis presentation quality.
Intriguingly, this observation holds independent of whether the content is from a Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD thesis. Rehearsal thus matters more than previous presentation experience.
This observation has been made by many others before me [1]. Then why have many, if not most of the presentations I have attended obviously not been rehearsed?
Continue reading “How You Can Predict If Your Presentation Will Suck”
When I listen to a thesis presentation, I need to get the big picture before I care about the details. Until I have understood the problem statement, for example, I do not care how an algorithm works or how its average-case amortized runtime complexity beats existing solutions. Not even if it is presented with a nifty visualization.
In other words, if the big picture of a presentation—its structure—is messed up, no amout of clever visuals can save it. The first priority is thus to get the presentation structure right.
Thesis Guide 