29 Oral Presentations

During this course, you will be required to give an oral presentation. This guide is intended to give you some pointers so that your presentations will be more effective.

Giving an oral presentation on a scientific project typically involves presenting a slideshow (e.g., in Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Google Slides, etc.) about your experiment(s). Your slideshow should include slides for each of the major sections that you would include in a formal lab report: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion/Conclusion. Often, citations for any references that you use, e.g., in the Introduction, are provided as a footnote on the slide containing the information you need to cite.

How Should My Team Present the Slideshow?

Prepare your presentation to take 8-12 minutes, followed by 3-5 minutes for questions from the audience. Each member of your team needs to present some part of the slideshow. You may divide this up as you please, but you should be sure to distribute the amount of content to be presented equally among all team members. One possible way to split up the talk is outlined below:

• Person 1: Introduction. Provide the audience with key background information that they need to understand your experiments. Why did your team choose to do the experiments that you will discuss in this talk?
• Person 2: Methods. What experiments did you perform? How did you set up the experiments?
• Person 3: Results. What happened? How did your initial experiments affect your decisions related to later experiments?
• Person 4: Discussion. What did your results mean? What did you learn from those results? Did you include a green chemistry analysis? How could you extend the project further (e.g., what additional experiments would be interesting)?

This distribution of presentation is just a suggestion. Clearly the topics of each person’s presentation will change from team to team and project to project.

When planning your talk, imagine that you will be teaching the material you discuss to your audience rather than simply reporting on it. Your points will come across better if you make an effort to explain and reach out to your audience.

What Makes a Good Presentation?

Slide Design

A good presentation has an appropriate balance of text and figures (graphs, diagrams, and/or other graphics). Avoid large blocks of text that you will be tempted to read verbatim; it is often better to write just the key statements that you want your audience to take away from a particular slide. You should still elaborate on those important points but do it verbally—if you prepare and smartly set up your slides (e.g., with the help of animating in things in the order you wish to discuss them), the text you do show should also help remind you of what you wanted to say!

One note about animations: simple animations, such as having text or figures appear as you begin to talk about them, can help guide the audience of where to look on your slide. Be careful with more complicated or excessive animations—that can be distracting to your audience, rather than helpful.

Organization

A well-organized presentation is more likely to be remembered, and the presenter of a well-organized presentation is more likely to be remembered favorably. Even though each member of your team will deliver part of the presentation, you should do your best to make your presentation a cohesive, seamless story. If your listeners can see how your points relate to each other and to your overriding message, those points will carry more meaning.

A Good Attitude

It is okay—even expected—to be nervous presenting in front of your peers, but you should do your best to be engaging. Even if your project is very similar to your classmates’ projects, a presentation is always more interesting if the presenter seems interested in what they did and cares about doing a good job.

Being respectful of your peers when they are presenting is also important. Some of your grade for the oral presentation will be based on your interactions with other teams who are presenting their projects. You are expected to pay attention, be polite, and ask questions during the Q&A portion.

Grading

You will be evaluated as a team on your slides and as an individual on your participation and presentation skills.

CEM 255 Oral Presentation Success Guide

This chapter was adapted from Erin Duffy’s work for Cooper, M. M. et al Cooperative Chemistry for Michigan State University, 2019.