Have you ever done an academic presentation? I bet you did. Powerpoint presentations are widely used to share your research with others during academic conferences, progress review meetings, PhD viva examinations and so on.
I do believe that with so many presentation tools available right now, we tend to overuse PowerPoint or Keynote in our work. You may be familiar with the term death by PowerPoint slides. If you aren’t, here’s a definition by TechTarget that I like the most:
“Death by PowerPoint is a phenomenon caused by the poor use of presentation software.
Key contributors to death by PowerPoint include confusing graphics, slides with too much text and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides out loud. Death by PowerPoint is easily recognized by observing the audience members’ glazed eyes, furtive use of smartphones and trips to the bathroom.”
It is not the type of academic presentation delivered by Motivated Academics! As motivated academics, we aim to inspire our audience with our research and give them a gift of knowledge. We’re not doing our presentation during an academic conference for the sake of ticking the box for our professional development reviews or promotion cases. We’re doing this because we want to share our research and share our findings with others.
You may, however, wonder why presentation skills are important? Maybe you haven’t presented at an academic conference or had a progress review meeting yet. Maybe you detest delivering academic presentations and feel anxious about standing in front of other people.
I get you – I was there myself. And let me reassure you, this is a normal feeling. Not each one of us was born a speaker. I wasn’t definitely and still remember my first conference presentation when I struggled to get any words out of my mouth. I stuttered, sweated and felt embarrassed afterwards. That was during my MSc programme when I was presenting my extracurricular research on heat pumps.
But guess what.
The more presentations I did over the past years, the more presentation slides I’ve developed, the easier it got. Now I’m actually looking forward to doing a conference presentation, whether face-to-face or online. I even started doing live events on LinkedIn and recorded online courses.
Why was I able to develop presentation skills? I knew these were crucial for building a successful academic career.
That’s why I reflected on my approach to preparing academic presentations and will share my tips on how you can prepare a good academic presentation. I do trust my presentation guidelines for students and researchers will be useful for you and will help you advance your academic career.
This article will not tell you how to do the presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but I am happy to put a workshop together on this topic if this would be of interest. So now let’s move to academic presentation tips!
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