Susan McConnell - Stanford University - "The Importance of Giving a Good Talk"
In science, we give a lot of talks.
We spend a lot of time presenting in lab meetings, in journal clubs.
We give seminars, we give lectures, we give job talks.
So, we're spending a lot of our time in science speaking to our colleagues,
and a lot of us dread this.
Some of us don't prepare for it really well,
and even if you prepare a lot,
you might end up feeling really crummy about the job you did afterward.
This stuff is important.
There are a lot of good reasons for giving a really clear,
really effective, well-organized talk
in which you communicate your science to your colleagues.
It's one of the primary ways that we advertise our work to other people.
In some ways, sometimes I think about myself as the marketing department of my own laboratory
because I'm out on the road giving seminars and talking about the work
and spreading the word almost.
But even more importantly, I think it's a tremendous opportunity
to tell a story about science in your own words.
If you're talking about your own work for example,
you might be discussing a couple of different papers.
And we all know that people don't read as much as they used to,
so giving a seminar‚Äîa research seminar‚Äî
is this great opportunity to actually tell the story in the way that you see the work.
And that presents an opportunity to influence the field itself
‚Äîto actually shape the field in which you work.
It's a great chance to get feedback.
If you're at a stage in a project where you're not quite certain
of which direction the project is going to go,
having a chance to give a talk and then getting feedback from colleagues at other institutions
can be extraordinarily helpful in generating new ideas
or in teasing apart what the most important direction might be to pursue,
or in developing the collaborations that you actually need to go in a certain direction.
In a funny kind of way, giving a good talk lets you be popular.
I mean, who of us was popular in high school?
We were all the science geeks, right?
But, if you give a good scientific presentation,
it turns out that really helps you get invited to meetings, to conferences,
to all kinds of gatherings in our field
that enable us to increase our network of interactions within science.
And, giving a good job talk actually really has a big influence on whether you get the job.
I've been a member on a lot of search committees,
and I can tell you that some jobs are lost in the first two minutes of a job talk,
at which point it becomes clear that
despite the fact that this person has done extraordinary, beautiful research,
that he or she doesn't have the communication skills to flourish in a department like mine,
which is an undergraduate teaching department.
In contrast, other job talks that are lucid and well-organized and compelling and exciting,
not only because of the data, but because of the delivery style
can really just nail the job for that person.
That is the person we want.
So, job talks have a big influence on your future.
You might think, well, you know, I work in biotech.
This whole presentation stuff isn't going to matter nearly as much for me,
but actually it might matter more.
More and more in industry, there are fewer written reports,
and major decisions about the future of projects
‚Äîwhat kind of projects to take into clinical development‚Äî
are based on oral presentations and are evaluated by the people for whom you work.
So, for an industry environment, it's conceivable that
actually giving a good talk is even more important than academia.
So, how do you give a good talk?
Well, there are a lot of resources out there for knowing some of the basics
about how to use Powerpoint wisely,
how to structure a talk so that it's audience friendly,
how to actually create a story that is simple enough to follow
that contains the minimum data that it takes
to convince the audience that your story is credible,
and yet not so much that the audience is drowning in data.
So, take advantage of some of these resources that
help to teach you what to incude and how to present it.
And then, importantly, rehearse your talk in front of your colleagues, get their feedback
‚Äînot only about the data, but the way the slides are built,
and whether the flow of the talk is well organized.
If you're brave, and I encourage you to be brave,
have yourself video taped and get a sense of how you appear to the audience as a speaker.
Are you engaging? Do you appear passionate about your work?
It turns out that your ability to convey excitement about your work
has a huge influence on the impact that it will have on the audience.
There are a lot of resources out there, I hope you'll take advantage of them,
because giving a good talk is important.
See more at ibiomagazine.org.
See scientific lectures at ibioseminars.org.