When it’s summer time, you know what it means as a PhD student – it’s conference season! Whether you’re presenting your work as a poster or oral presentation, it is a valuable opportunity to get feedback on how to improve your work. I’ve learnt a lot presenting my own work and going to other presentations so here are my tips and tricks to make the most of these presentations, no matter what scale your conference is at! 

The big question for your presentation is: what is the narrative? This is the most important component to your presentation since it determines what you will include and how exactly you’ll tell the story. The goal of your presentation is to convince someone who doesn’t know much about the work that this is an important topic to research, and that any data you’ve generated is exciting. This is also the chance for you to tailor the content of your presentation to the themes of the conference if there is one. 

For the presentation itself, do you have a colour scheme or template to use? Most PhD funders or universities have these resources available so all you need to do is to add your content into the spaces provided. On that note, make sure to acknowledge all the people who have helped with your work! Obvious candidates include your funder, core facilities that helped perform certain experiments and patients if you work with patient samples! You can also include your contact details e.g. email and LinkedIn profile. 

Use your presentation as the opportunity to prepare what my supervisor calls “minimum publishable units” – these are figures/tables that can go towards publications and your thesis, making life a lot easier down the line! Make sure to have your slides/poster ready in time. This will give you ample time to ask your supervisors for feedback and besides, you might need to submit these materials to the organisers before a specified deadline. Things like poster printing can take longer during conference season since other people might also have posters to print. 

For your presentation, practise practise practise! This will help you sound smooth, also a really good chance for you to develop the key takeaways for your project. Keep to time limits if there are any, this will give you some leeway in case your nerves on the day make you ramble. Make a note of the questions that come up when you speak to other people about your work because this is useful feedback for future work and your thesis. 

Most importantly, try your best to relax and immerse yourself in the experience! Your first presentation will probably be the hardest because you’re starting from scratch, but once you do the first one, the work for it will go towards future presentations and those will be a lot easier to prepare. If you have a presentation coming up, good luck! 

Until the next post, 

Jean