Tips for preparing/practicing for seminar length (~45min) presentation?

[FishNerd]

So I am rapidly approaching my Master's thesis defense and I have to give a seminar length presentation over my thesis (~40-45 min presentation, ~5-10 min for questions) to the department/university public before doing the defense with my committee in a closed room. I am fairly well-practiced with giving conference length presentations (~12 min presentation, ~3 min for questions), but I have only ever given presentations longer than this in a handful of classes and those were definitely different beasts. Does anyone have any tips on preparing this type of presentation to a scientific, but not subfield specific audience? Also if anyone has tips on how to practice for this sort of presentation I would greatly appreciate it since I know practicing something that long will not be nearly as easy as practicing a conference presentation.

[TakeruK]

Hello! I found this challenging when I had to learn it as well. Fortunately for me, my Masters defense was only 20 minutes long and I had other presentation opportunities (classes, other conferences) that gave me 30 minute time slots, so it was a lot easier to work my way up to 45 minutes. However it's an incredibly useful skill to have! The 45-60 min length talk is standard for the end of your PhD and beyond, and by the time I graduated I gave more than a dozen hour-long talks from visiting schools around North America. 

Here are some tips that I learned:

1. Practice really really does make perfect. And yes, the 45 minute time length does make it hard to practice. But it's not impossible. For the first few talks, I really do recommend actually practicing the entire 45 minute talk at least once, if not two or three times. The way I would approach it is to first practice the entire talk, just to run through it, identify problem areas, etc. The goal here for me is to just go through it---I don't stop to make changes. Then, break your talk into chunks and really fine tune those chunks. For each chunk (~10 minutes) I would go through it, make changes and go through it again. No stopping for each chunk. If I find some slides or places where I mess up or where I think it doesn't sound that smooth, I would practice that individual slide and make edits, practice again etc. Once that slide is good, I go back and practice the whole chunk. Then, I move on to the next chunk. Once I'm happy with every single chunk, I practice each chunk again. Then I go for at least one run through of the entire talk. Usually there are issues at transitions between chunks so I might practice those individually before moving onto the entire talk. If it's a very new talk to me and when it was one of my first talks, I would want to practice the whole thing, after fine-tuning at least once or twice. Space out your practices over a week to not burn yourself out! 

I'll be honest though: this level of practice is not sustainable in the long term. But after practicing this intensely for one or two talks, you'll improve a ton and you won't need as much practice in the future. At one point in my PhD, I was giving enough of these talks in a short period of time** that I only practice a few key slides. I choose these slides to be really important ones where I really want to make my message clear. And also the first 1-3 slides because I found that once I start strong, it stays with me through the talk but if I have a nervous talk, the whole thing is affected. In the past year though, I have given fewer of these talks and I under-prepared for a recent talk. It was still fine but I know I could have done it better. So I need to follow my own advice to practice more too!

(**There was one especially tough week where I gave 4 talks at 4 institutions in 2 cities over 4 days. Very exhausting, would not schedule that again!!).

2. Pace yourself / go slow! I limit myself to no more than 1 slide per minute. Cramming in more than 45 slides in a 45 min slot means you'll talk a lot faster. I also try to talk extra slow when practicing because I want to have the "muscle memory" of going through it slowly. A longer 45-minute seminar is much different from a short conference talk, in my opinion. Going slow helps the audience stay engaged, especially if they missed an earlier point or are still digesting it. I also like to put in planned pauses and breaks for people to ask clarification questions. Sometimes they are explicit breaks where I ask people for questions, but sometimes I just pause after a very info-dense slide to a) allow people to digest the info, b ) allow people to raise their hand for a question if it's allowed and c) to take a breather/drink of water and "reset" myself (I often start speeding up after such a slide).

3. Make your talk modular. This will apply more when you have done several of these talks, but it will really help you practice and be able to build on your past experience. I try to spend a lot of time designing slides in the first place that can be used for more than one talk. I currently have about 3 hours worth of talk material that I can construct into different 1-hour talks based on who I am talking to. Usually the motivation/intro parts of my talks are all very similar so this means I don't have to practice them as much. I can just focus my practice time etc. on the new stuff. But this isn't as helpful to you right now, other than whatever parts of your previous conference talks you can either use as modules or expand.

4. For this type of talk and especially for non-sub-field expert audiences, take your time with your introduction. Start from simple concepts that everyone understands and then build on that. It's okay that there will be some members of the audience that know some of the stuff already---they can be nodding along and feel good about themselves that they know what you are going to say next. It's always far better to explain something the audience already knows than to skip something critical and confuse them. Furthermore, I would say that you should aim about 80% of your talk to the least knowledgeable person in the room. Make sure that someone who is science educated but not necessarily experienced in your subfield can still understand ~80% of the talk and be able to leave with the same main takeaway point as the others. However, you can and should spend a little bit of time talking at a very advanced level for the few experts in the room (you want them to leave learning something too). A good strategy is to leave this part near the end---you gain your audience's trust and confidence by showing that you can explain things that they can understand. Then, you might go for 1-2 minutes very much in depth into one topic and maybe not everyone can follow you in those few minutes. However, you should then quickly go back to familiar ground again.

5. Avoid jargon for your subfield where possible. Just take the time to say what you mean or the long form of something. Even if you explain it in the beginning, it's hard for people who don't use the jargon every day to remember it.

[FishNerd]

Wow thank you so much for all of this! This will really help me when I am preparing! Also I really appreciate the info on how to make it approachable to a broader audience. That really helps me figure out how I need to structure the overall talk. I luckily have an extremely solid and well-practiced conference presentation that I have been expanding off of so I have some great slides that will remain unchanged and a great source of already made figures.

[rising_star]

If at all possible, practice in front of a friend or two in advance. This is something that I think is key. They'll help point out where you could improve as a presenter but also any weak spots in the slides or the content you've included. Buy them a beverage as a thank you.

[FishNerd]

@rising_star thank you! that is always one of my go to's when practicing a new presentation! I will be practicing it several times with my advisor as well to fine tune it.

[rising_star]

The other thing I would say is that you don't want to overpractice or go through it too many times (yes, there is such a thing). In my experience, that leads to a presentation where everyone feels like the presenter is just going through the motions.

[maxhgns]

I can only second everything TakerUK said: practice is very important, and it shows. You can immediately spot a talk that's been practised, and one that hasn't. My own rule of thumb is 8-10 dry runs for a 20-30 minute conference talk. For 45+, I'd do exactly as TakerUK recommends.

The only thing I'll add is that where slides are concerned, less is more. Your slides should be uncluttered, and just raise a single point (or two) which you'll then address in more detail. Think of them as cue cards. I'd also aim for far fewer slides than one per minute, although your disciplinary norms might make that less feasible (e.g. if you're presenting a lot of data). 

[FishNerd]

I just wanted to update and say that everyone's tips really helped me in pulling together a really good, solid seminar this past week! Everyone who I've talked to complimented my presentation so I guess it went pretty well. I think the only thing I could have done better was to have maybe have had one more day of practice, but unfortunately less than 48 hours before my presentation my PowerPoint turned all my pictures into red X-es so that unforeseen mishap took away a few hours I had been planning on practicing during (and I had some personal stuff come up that previous week that made me less productive than planned and meant that I was doing final practice runs later than I had planned on). I think the tips on focusing on practicing and fine-tuning the rough areas/slides were the most helpful because that meant that I definitely felt fairly comfortable on those and it meant that I wasn't practicing the whole presentation over and over and over.

I should also say that I successfully defended my masters thesis with my committee on Friday! Now I just have to modify my seminar into an ~25 min presentation that we need to give in front of the people who helped fund and provide permits for the project for this upcoming week. Hooray!