T.E.A.C.H

Tutoring and Education by Astrophobe for Charity and Honor

[askrophobe]

My seminar went really well, thank you for your advice!

How kind of Tumblr to suddenly add this ask to my inbox 11 days after (xkit claims) it was sent. I’m really glad to hear it, congratulations! Let me know if I can help you with anything else down the line

[askrophobe]

quietandkittens replied to your post “I decided to respond on this blog because I remembered last week that...”

This is really great! Do you consider tables to fall under the 'things to communicate visually' category?

Thanks, and that’s a very good point! Absolutely, tables are a way more efficient way of communicating certain types of information than speaking, so just replace “figures” in my post with “tables and figures”

[askrophobe]

Three administrative matters:

I just remembered that this blog exists, so we’ll see if I can overcome the crush of the semester and spur it to activity. More realistically, maybe this summer?

I ordered a cheap tablet today, so I’ll soon be able to legibly write when I record videos. Hurray!

I’ll probably eventually migrate this somewhere else, with the end goal of escaping tumblr and adopting a name that isn’t a silly modification of my main url

[askrophobe]

I decided to respond on this blog because I remembered last week that it exists, so I might as well use it!  Sorry that it took me ten days to respond -- I appreciate that you let me know that your presentation is far away so that I knew this ask wasn't time sensitive.

Two important disclaimers. 1) I know absolutely nothing about your field! I have literally never taken a standalone biology course, not even in high school. 2) I have unorthodox opinions about presentations -- I think my opinions stand on very solid ground, but they’re not standard. 

Also, before I get going, I’ll acknowledge that I’ve written a huge amount! This is because I took this ask as an opportunity to say all of the things that I wish I could say to everyone in academia. Unfortunately a lot of it will probably not apply to you (I guess it all technically falls under “any general tips”), but a) since I have very little information about you I can’t really guess which parts will be most useful for you, and b) this is a nice opportunity to write down my general thoughts about presenting complicated information.

With that in mind, here's the simple truth: most academics give awful presentations. I think chances are good that your professor doesn’t really know how to give a good presentation. Pedagogy is devastatingly unimportant in academia, and the total apathy towards effective transfer of information means that people never learn how to give good presentations at workshops, in their own departments, or at conferences. In my opinion, maybe 3/4 of the battle has very little do with content; so many people adopt such a terrible style in academic presentations that the information is completely obscured, so by adopting an accessible presentation style you can already deliver an unusually effective presentation.

To help fix this, I'll lay out my rough guide for how to give good academic presentations! First I'll make three points about style, then I'll give a very short outline of the content that I recommend including.

The basics of style for academic presentations:

The biggest mistake that people make in academic presentations is overburdened powerpoint slides. Here’s my rule of thumb: every visual in your presentation should communicate something that really is best conveyed visually. Putting blocks of text on a powerpoint slide is the worst culprit; I see it almost daily, but of course you can say words much more effectively than people can read-while-also-listening. In fact, I’m quite extreme in this regard: I avoid slides completely if possible, and if I have to use them then I almost never put words on them (with obvious exceptions, like axis labels on graphs). Here’s a great example of how to use images, delivered in the TEDx format by a wonderful former supervisor of mine whose job description includes giving really good presentations (I would recommend watching maybe 3 minutes to understand my point, but also the whole presentation is great and everyone should watch all of it). Consider also that things like equations, chemical reactions, and those absurdly complicated protein synthesis diagrams can only be communicated as images, so these all pass my test.

Keep your eye firmly on the prize: academic presentations have precisely one goal, which is transferring information. Most of the professors I’ve had in graduate school constantly forget this. If I showed you the equation below, spent 15 seconds naming each of the variables, said three sentences about it, and then switched to the next slide, there are two possibilities. Either nobody in the room will be able to follow it, or I’m talking to a room full of accomplished astrophysicists. If nobody followed it, why did I show the equation? Usually in academia the reason is that I wanted to look really smart by confusing my peers. If the room is full of stellar evolution experts, what was accomplished by showing the equation rather than just naming the property of it that mattered, like “as we know from relativistic degeneracy, even as core density increases core temperature actually does not tend to zero”? The only case in which I should show the full equation is if I need to have a detailed discussion of it, and either I’m going to completely explain it from the ground up or I can assume that everyone in the audience already knows it. If something in your presentation doesn’t help you communicate the information you want to share with people, take it out. If everyone even tried to follow this rule, most of the classes I’ve taken would have been unrecognizably improved. I should also note that this rule can be taken too seriously; I’m completely in favor of, say, funny anecdotes, because they usually do increase the information that people get from you and they also align with other goals we have as human beings such as not being dull.

My last style point is much harder for some people than others, and don’t worry about it if it’s just not something you can do. But as much as you’re able, make sure to physically include your audience. Memorize and practice what you’re going to say as much as you can, so that you can make eye contact with your audience and make them feel engaged. Talk loudly enough for people to hear you properly. If the format allows, try to ask a simple question of your audience every once in a while. These small steps dramatically improve how effective your presentation is. I pay way more attention when I feel some level of accountability and inclusion: frankly, if the presenter is regularly glancing at me and soliciting audience responses then I know that someone’s going to notice if I’m not paying attention, and I definitely take in more information. Having said that, especially if you’re shy or nervous, don’t get hung up on policing your mannerisms. There’s an instructive video online of me introducing a panel discussion I organized last year, in the first ~2 minutes of this video. I’m doing a few things well: I didn’t rely on visuals because I didn’t need them, I’m trying to say complicated things simply and accessibly and concisely (particularly because I’m talking to a general audience), I’m leaning in and looking directly at the audience (until I have to read something that I didn’t have time to memorize), and I’m talking loudly enough and with active intonation. But from my many years as an amateur actor I can also point out tons of things I’m doing poorly: I have some distracting verbal ticks like loudly saying “um” and this visual tick where I brush my hair back, I’m clearly not comfortable in my skin (there are about 200 strangers in the room and it always takes me a few minutes to get comfortable in front of a crowd), I’m dancing around too much, I didn’t have the time to get as solid on Justin’s bio as I should have, and so on. If you watch a minute longer you’ll see Justin take the stage; he does this sort of thing for a living and he’s much more polished than I am. But my point is that flaws like weird mannerisms and nervousness don’t really matter for academic presentations; what you should focus on is bringing your audience in and conveying information in the best way you can; unlike in acting, style in academic presentations is not an art so much as a tool for conveying information.

Bonus point: be enthusiastic!! Science is awesome, you’re studying a subject you love because you want to be an expert in it, you’re in a room full of your brilliant and interested peers, and your job is to share the fruits of human discovery with people who want to hear! This presentation is a wonderful thing and you should try to show with your whole body and your every word that this is something to be excited about!

On to content! My content points are much shorter. I want to outline the three broad questions that a presentation which summarizes a paper should answer, with the very important caveat that I’m not a member of your field. I’ll assert that what I’m about to say goes for how to summarize papers in both astrophysics and political science, though, so it probably also applies to molecular biology.

What’s the background for this paper? This is probably just a summary of their literature review, maybe with some added context if you like. Don’t spend more than a few minutes on this

What did they discover? Again, there’s probably not a ton to say here

Why should we believe them? This is usually the major part where you’ll spend most of the presentation

Once you’ve covered those three, spend a few minutes wrapping up. One maxim I like is this format: here’s what I’m going to tell you, here’s what I’m telling you, here’s what I just told you. Usually the introductory part should take about 1/4 of the time, the middle part should take about 1/2 the time, and the conclusion takes the last 1/4, although in practice of course it’s never this clean.

Concerning your specific questions: figures are great! They’re a perfect example of good visuals to include. If the authors made a figure of something, it means they think it’s *really* important, since space is the most valuable commodity in journals and figures take up tons of space. You almost certainly should include those.

As for worrying about spelling things out for your classmates, I would honestly be more worried about not spelling things out enough. Academia is full of pompousness and pretense; everyone pretends to know way more than they do, and people rarely admit when they don’t know something. I worry that we often talk right over peoples’ heads and don’t even realize it. I do completely understand your concern about appearing condescending, but I have two responses to it. The first is that I am more offended if someone assumes that I know something that I have no reason to know, or that I can do something that’s basically impossible. For example, a well-meaning professor who I respect tremendously will frequently go to conferences and show equations staggeringly more complicated than the relativistic degeneracy equation up there, but just breeze right through them. The implication seems to be that everyone in the room should either know every equation intimately (even ones that were just invented) or they should be able to instantly parse some giant triple integral followed by 20 Greek letters. Nobody can, so everybody feels bad and nobody learns anything. That’s so much more disrespectful than telling me things I already know. My second response is that there are ways to undercut this. I will sometimes start obvious-sounding sentences with “because not everyone has taken a probability course I should quickly explain that [insert basic thing about probability]”, or “just so everyone’s on the same page, when I say [common jargon word], I mean [meaning of common jargon word]”. I think these are way better than just assuming that everyone has a very high level of common knowledge.

Now, I would have a whole lot more to say about this if I knew anything about your field, but I shouldn’t try to give specific advice about the content of a presentation that I wouldn’t even be able to understand. Thanks for giving me this platform to rail against the standards for public speaking in academia, and good luck! Please always feel free to reach out if you have any more questions or if you want anything clarified.

[askrophobe]

We learned about QQ plots in statistics this week, but we kind of skimmed the derivation that gets you from calculating a quantile to the linear trend on a QQ plot. Can you explain those steps?

I have never studied this, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t help. If you think it’s worth the effort, would you be willing to send me the specific information that you’re looking for, like exactly which two concepts you want connected, and perhaps what little derivation you did see in the class?

[askrophobe]

how do?

With hard work and good feedback!

[askrophobe]

Sizes of sets and random variables