I successfully defended my masters thesis on June 7th, 2012. Originally, I was a PhD student. Drama ensued (nothing new there) and I decided to end my journey with a Masters. It’s been a roller coaster ride with a lot more downs than ups, but I wanted to document my thoughts and maybe provide some tips to my future self or to others.

I’ll start off by posting the tips, then elaborating a little further with my personal story. These tips are mostly relevant for organizing a presentation based on written work (e.g., a paper) but there are some points that are more general and can apply to other types of presentations. I’ll repeat a few tips I saw when I was looking for tips as these are very important and were the most relevant to me.

• Time yourself every time you practice. Your actual presentation will probably be 5-10 minutes shorter than your average time during practice. If your talk is around 40 minutes and you’re clocking in at 35, consider adding 2 or 3 more slides to talk about. If you’re clocking in at 50, consider removing some content.
• Practice as much as you can – even if you can’t speak out loud, go through it in your mind. Mental rehearsals are particularly effective while driving.
• Remember it’s your presentation based on your work. Ask yourself what is the main message you want to get across and what points can you pull from your paper to help support that message? You don’t have time to cram in all of the details – pull out the bigger ideas and specific examples that will support those ideas. Leave out items that sound cool, but are not relevant.
• If you have time, at least a week prior to your actual presentation, give a practice talk for feedback from colleagues.
• If presenting with slides, don’t cram it with your script, i.e., don’t read off of the slides. Most of your points should have additional narrative to give it more context. Your points are present on the slide as a reminder of what you’ll be talking about next and helps to anchor the main point in your audience’s mind.
• Don’t memorize a script and don’t read from a script – it lends to a very bland presentation. Hopefully if you’re giving a presentation, it is on a topic you are passionate about and have invested a lot of time into. Consider the presentation the pinnacle of your project (a “catharsis”).
• Make your presentation tight – if you’re giving examples, don’t give too many unless it’s called for. You can reuse your examples to emphasize different points and helps the audience hold onto the different facets of your talk with the example as an anchoring point.
• If you are in charge of your own scheduling, figure out when you’ll be at your best – morning or afternoon? Consider your anxiety – will you be better off getting a presentation over with (morning) or do you have no problems with anxiety (afternoon)? Consider also day of week and the same applies, would you rather get the presentation over with in the beginning or would you rather have extra days for practice?
• Bring a bottle of water with you.
• Expect to make mistakes during your presentation. This is okay.

Everyone has a different approach to crafting a presentation. Prior to defending my masters thesis, the longest presentation I had to give was 10-15 minutes. I was aiming for 40 minutes, the average for the department, and clocked in at 32 minutes – my average time practicing was 35 minutes, but after I added 2-3 slides, I was up to 38 minutes and it was already making me uncomfortable. I was afraid I was going to be speaking for too long. My fears were ungrounded and instead I had the reverse case – my presentation was too short! I added about 10 seconds by coming up with some additional narrative on my second-to-last slide. This example should show just how hard it can be to time a presentation when you’re not under the same pressure as the actual presentation. Most people will talk faster and skip points when nervous – this is normal, just be ready to anticipate it.

I knew I would have to give a talk when my masters thesis was originally my advancement/phase 2/quals. I was playing around in my mind with ideas on how to open the talk, but it all got discarded when a committee member pointed me to some literature which referenced another work with an idea I had. I decided to discard it because I didn’t have time to look into that other work and I didn’t want to open myself to trying to answer unnecessary questions. I had 2 weeks to prepare a presentation. The first week was spent organizing a rough set of slides, and the second week was spent refining those slides through practice.

My style is to be as minimalist as possible. Ironically, my thesis is very dense. My first set of slides were all over the place as I originally tried to distill slides from my paper. Going through those slides and mentally rehearsing what I’d be saying, it was not flowing very well and I kept reorganizing and trying to make it work. I decided to use the fact since my paper is dense, the main message that I wanted to get across can easily be lost. The main message that the audience should walk away with was the same as the one I had been telling people what my paper was about while it was being written. I used it as an anchor. It went on my first slide after the title slide. Some other tips I read about included having an outline of the talk and the context or why your talk is important. I divided my talk into 3 topics and the division was not clean – rather, the 3 topics corresponded to the three main areas that supported my message. Again, this was a personal choice. It provided 3 points for the audience to remember along with the message.

Unfortunately, since I only had 2 weeks to get this presentation ready, I didn’t have enough time to practice in front of colleagues. I was, of course, regretting this as I went into my actual presentation. However, given the way things occurred, there wasn’t much I could do about it and essentially had to have faith in my own work. I had to trust myself and not second-guess because I was at a point beyond second-guessing. Practicing, both out loud and mentally, helps to “bond” you with your presentation. You start to pick up on things that don’t seem quite right or flow well. You start to realize where the natural break points are or if there aren’t any (and there should be some to let your audience catch up to what you’ve been saying). You become your best critic because you have an idea of how your presentation should go and if it’s not coming out that way, then something needs to be edited.

Back to the beginning slides example, I had three slides dealing with seriousness in play, characteristics of the serious player, and the relation of video games to play (as a medium). I had quotes explaining how play can be serious. I cut them out. Seriousness in play is an important point as it added context to my message, but what was more important were the characteristics of the serious player and the video game as a medium through which this serious play occurs. Some ideas can seem very important as you are putting slides together, but if you feel something is not quite right or if you feel it’s not the presentation you want to give, then consider dropping those ideas or reusing them in another context. In the case of seriousness in play, I had no written points on it, but spoke about it in a couple of sentences – it was important enough to verbally mention, but not important enough to write down.

Slides serve a dual purpose. For the presenter, it serves as reminders of what points to talk about. For the audience, it serves as important points to focus on. Use bullet points, don’t write your script on those slides. As an audience member, I find that I cannot read what’s on a slide and listen to the presenter at the same time. Others are more capable of doing this, especially those who say that the audience is capable of reading slides so you as the presenter don’t have to read off of them. Take the advice as you like, but the more you practice with slides as bullet points, the more comfortable you’ll be with the verbal content of your talk. It will change each time you practice. Don’t worry. You’re not memorizing a script, so you don’t have to worry about what you plan on saying. You’ve practiced so many times looking at bullet points that the words should flow naturally. There are two caveats. The first is making last minute changes to your slides and you may remember parts of what you want to say but haven’t practiced it enough. The second is transitions between slides. The fix to this is quite simple: use presenter view if you have dual monitors and make use of the notes section. If you don’t have dual monitors, print out your slides and write your notes there.

Make your presentation tight. I am not sure how to emphasize this enough. When I was practicing, I had examples that were all over the place in the beginning. Then, as I practiced more, I realized I could tie one example from early in the talk to a point I make at the middle and end of the talk. This saved me the trouble of having multiple random examples and just adds more consistency to your talk. I keep referencing back to the “beginning slides” in this post. You may or may not have noticed that this also occurs in a lot of fiction books and some TV shows. Minor characters play an important role later in the story. Seemingly minor events, such as a memory (see Grave Peril by Jim Butcher), can become a major part of the plot. Another point of making your presentation tight is to have summary slides – the main points you were just talking about that will carry through to the next topic or at a later point. The repetition helps the audience to pick up on the important points as well as giving them that time to catch up.

Some other items to consider is when a good time is for you to be presenting. I personally wanted to get things out of the way, so I scheduled a morning presentation. I was restricted on the actual day of week (Thursday) so that couldn’t be helped. In terms of dealing with anxiety, I was given a couple of pieces of advice. One involved taking anti-anxiety pills. I personally don’t like taking things that affect my mind when I’m expected to perform, so this advice wasn’t useful. That’s not to say it didn’t seem like a good idea. Another piece of advice was to breathe, listen to music, and “get loose.”

Here’s my advice: anxiety is normal. Just remember that you’ve (hopefully) been practicing many times and any more practice, you may as well just get it over with. You’re going to be nervous, your voice will quaver, but once you’ve been talking for a few minutes, you’ll settle into your “practice routine.” I did one practice talk as one of the first things I did after getting up as a sanity check, then I didn’t touch it afterward. I put in my time. I was happy with what I had to present with. It was going to be over in an hour or so and life moves on. It helps me to think that my nervousness is miniscule because life will continue and whatever happens, happens. Just work with what’s left as best you can. I did listen to some music and spend a minute or so just focusing on breathing, but the anxiety will still be present until you start talking. “Getting loose” is helpful because if you’re too tense, you’re just going to freeze. Just relax and all the practice will take over.

Bring a bottle of water. I showed a couple of videos in the middle of my talk and that gave me some time to moisten my mouth without making awkward pauses during my actual talk. You can also take a sip as a “natural break” for the audience to catch up, but I feel awkward drinking water in the middle of talking. I have seen presentations where the speaker will take a sip at odd points. Try to avoid this as it’s distracting and breaks the audience from the flow of your talk. If you’re clearly running hoarse, then definitely take a sip of water as by now you’re already distracting the audience.

Last tip is perhaps the most important and the reason why I suggest to not use a script. Mistakes are normal and they will happen. You’ll say something by accident, mix up your words or stumble, or you forget to say something. The key is to practice your talk so much that the mistakes you make are minor. No one is expecting perfection. It’s great if you have it, but it also adds more character to your talk – makes it more real. These mistakes should be genuine and you should be able to recover from them because you’ve practiced so much. Just apologize if you stumble and correct yourself. Practice this during practice. You’ll find that you are making less mistakes because you’re catching yourself and mentally you’re correcting it for the next run.

If you’ve made it this far, I want to emphasize again that everyone has a unique approach to crafting their presentations. Mine is to be as minimalistic as possible – what is the main message and what are the points I can discuss that will bring out that message? Not to mention, black text on white slides. Yours may be different. The most important piece of advice is to make it yours. You have spent months doing the research and writing the paper. Make the presentation yours. Bring out who you are through your presentation.

I am a gamer and in my presentation, I did not have any slides that connected video games to other types of software (except if someone asked what my future work was). The committee wanted to see that connection and I answered their questions about it, but it had no place in my slides. My slides were a statement that games needed to be treated on their own, not as a stepping stool because of society’s view of games (as “just for fun”). I recognize that there are always “broader impacts” to be considering, but the main point of my talk was not about those broader impacts (it’s future work for someone else to do), but rather what was happening in games and gamers.

That said, I also suggest one-on-one meetings with each of your committee members. Each one will have a different take on the paper you write, especially if you have a diverse committee like I did. Work their comments into your slides, but retain the sense of yourself. It’s possible. I was able to do it and I feel my presentation was able to connect with each them because I had done so. One of them even commented that she was glad to see her comments come out so clearly in my talk. It maintains a good a relationship between you and your committee members. But always remember that you can’t integrate everything, so don’t try. Use what works, discard what doesn’t. Most importantly, not everyone will be completely satisfied but yourself. It’s your presentation, be happy with it.