2023-06-07 | Blog 017

I presented my work at a conference for the first time about a fortnight ago. I thought I'd share some thoughts.

In a sentence: the presentation went as well as it could have, but I over-prepared for it. I believe I speak clearly, slowly, and confidently enough. The "story" was clear and well reasoned, the slides didn't have too much text, images were large enough... I think all the details were right. These are quite easy things to check for but I saw quite a few presentations over the conference fail these points.

I was the very first one up for the session on Digital Twins, so I felt I had to explain some of the concepts slightly more than if I was last up. This ate into my time a bit, but I/my supervisors took the decision that it would be better to have 80% of the room understand half my work, rather than 20% understand all my work. I felt this paid off as I completely filled the time at the end for questions. Again, maybe a third of the other presentations I attended didn't get this.

Regarding the over-preparing, I spent a long time on the slides. Part of that must surely be down to the learning curve of making slides, next time I'll spend more time up front on the storyboard. However, I also spent a long time on some GIFs which showed the results in a slightly more swish way. I'm not sure they were worth it... I'm pretty sure I could have sketched the shape of what I wanted to show in 2 minutes and the audience would have gotten the information. I also spent a long time meticulously planning each point and developing a script for what I wanted to hit on the slides. Given that there was slightly less time on the day for the actual presentation than I hoped, I had to gloss over some points anyway.

The pressure of presenting was not nearly as high as I had worried. I had quite a few restless nights thinking about the presentation, but after I had said hello to the audience, I was fine. Overall, I'd say the experience has changed my perspective on public speaking, it's really not that bad when you're talking about stuff you know and are passionate about.

As a final point, I would like to recognise the massive and random advantage that I have for being born in the UK. And I don't just mean that in the "life lottery" way, I mean that English is my native language and the language for most conferences in the West tends to be English (this conference was in the UK , but you get the point). There is no language barrier for presenting my work, either for conferences or papers, and that makes my academic life significantly easier.

If you are interested in seeing the slides, have a look here.

Rory