International congress presentation in August

[Adelaide9216]

Hello,

is it okay to present unfinished work at a international congress? It's not a student organized congress, it's a congress with 600+ participants and stuff. Like some of you know, I have to change a lot of things in my research project and it's going to be clearly not at the stage I wanted it to be by the end of August. 

[Hope.for.the.best]

45 minutes ago, Adelaide9216 said:

Hello,

is it okay to present unfinished work at a international congress? It's not a student organized congress, it's a congress with 600+ participants and stuff. Like some of you know, I have to change a lot of things in my research project and it's going to be clearly not at the stage I wanted it to be by the end of August. 

Absolutely no problem. You will never get to finish a project anyway, because you can always think of future work and directions. What you could do is present whatever you have got with some justifiable conclusions, then discuss some limitations and future work. 

[TakeruK]

Yes, definitely. Check with your advisor to see the norms in your field. For me, I am always presenting unfinished work at conferences and have been for years. I did not have a "completed" work until my 3rd year of my PhD so conferences in years 1-2 were always "here's what I'm doing and here's a glimpse of what we've found". Afterwards, the presentations were "here's what I discovered, now it has lead to this other research question and here's what I'm doing on that"

I think this is different in other fields because I've gotten some surprise from others here, but we generally give the same presentation over and over again in my field because there's different people at each conference and there's always a little update you've made since the last conference. Later on, when we're more senior students with multiple projects then we could present different projects at different conferences. However, the typical presentation in our field is either a poster (jr student) or 5-7 minutes so it's not like we present enough information that we can be "scooped" or whatever. Consequently, no one expects a fully completed project to be presented at a conference (it would take way more than 5 minutes to properly go over) and it's easy enough to give a short presentation on a project-in-prep without worrying about someone scooping you.

[rising_star]

You can present unfinished work however, don't use this as an excuse to not do as much as you can before you present.

[Adelaide9216]

1 hour ago, rising_star said:

You can present unfinished work however, don't use this as an excuse to not do as much as you can before you present.

Oh, I'm way too much of a perfectionnist to do that lol. 

[Adelaide9216]

4 hours ago, TakeruK said:

Yes, definitely. Check with your advisor to see the norms in your field. For me, I am always presenting unfinished work at conferences and have been for years. I did not have a "completed" work until my 3rd year of my PhD so conferences in years 1-2 were always "here's what I'm doing and here's a glimpse of what we've found". Afterwards, the presentations were "here's what I discovered, now it has lead to this other research question and here's what I'm doing on that"

I think this is different in other fields because I've gotten some surprise from others here, but we generally give the same presentation over and over again in my field because there's different people at each conference and there's always a little update you've made since the last conference. Later on, when we're more senior students with multiple projects then we could present different projects at different conferences. However, the typical presentation in our field is either a poster (jr student) or 5-7 minutes so it's not like we present enough information that we can be "scooped" or whatever. Consequently, no one expects a fully completed project to be presented at a conference (it would take way more than 5 minutes to properly go over) and it's easy enough to give a short presentation on a project-in-prep without worrying about someone scooping you.

Phew! Reassuring. Thanks!

[fuzzylogician]

You can present an unfinished project, but you need to be comfortable with the level of detail you get into. You may not have a fully fleshed out manuscript-length paper yet, but if you don't even have an analysis of some preliminary pilot data, that may not be enough to present. You also need to be familiar enough with all the steps of the study to answer any questions, and you don't want to be caught off guard by questions about how much you can generalize from your study, or whether you even have enough data/robustness to say much of anything. Short answer: yes, you can do it, but there's also a line of unpreparedness you don't want to cross. Talk to your advisor. 

[Adelaide9216]

My supervisor suggested that I present something I've done for a congress last year in June. But I feel like that would not be enough (it's a case study with results and it was supposed to be an introduction/glimpse into my initial research project). I think I'm gonna present that case study and explain that my research project changed along the way and explain these changes..or do a lit review type of presentation?

Edited April 12, 2018 by Adelaide9216

[Adelaide9216]

Also, I Wonder, how "expert" do I need to sound during my presentation? I feel like everyone at the conference will already know what I will be talking about but since it's an international conference and there will be people from different countries, maybe my assumption is wrong. I don't know if I should do a kind of  "my topic 101" type of presentation...

[fuzzylogician]

As a general rule, for a broad audience it's often wise to start out slower, explicitly laying out the basics of your subfield and research question. But you're there to report a new finding, and you should make sure you get to that. Also as a general rule, assume you audience is all smart and well-read, but maybe they're not up on the latest buzzwords of your particular question, so you're there not to educate anyone but simply to make sure you're all speaking the same language at the outset. I'd recommend speaking with your advisor and others who'd attended this particular conference to learn what's expected. Even if the conference is large, if there are multiple sessions you are likely to get people who are interested in your work, hence who have at least some familiarity with your subfield. If that's the case you may not need to be all that slow, though I find it's still often helpful to be explicit about your assumptions, because conference days are long and not everyone will be familiar with everything you say. Think of it as an exercise in being helpful to your audience.

 

[TakeruK]

9 hours ago, Adelaide9216 said:

Also, I Wonder, how "expert" do I need to sound during my presentation? I feel like everyone at the conference will already know what I will be talking about but since it's an international conference and there will be people from different countries, maybe my assumption is wrong. I don't know if I should do a kind of  "my topic 101" type of presentation...

How long do you have for your presentation? In my field, at most large general conferences, you get 5-7 minutes to talk. At smaller more focused conferences, you get 15-20 minutes for a contributed talk and 30-45 mins for an invited review talk. So, in my field, you only take the "my topic 101" approach if you have one of these long invited talks. To make sure we're on the same page, when I say "my topic 101" approach, I mean a talk where the majority of the time is dedicated to what others have worked on, so that it's more like a literature review. 

So, although there may well be differences due to different fields, unless you have an invited review talk, I would encourage you to focus your talk on what you did. Definitely include important background material, but don't treat it as a literature review. Instead, be very selective and think about the background as the minimum necessary things the audience needs to know in order to first understand why the question you're studying is important/relevant/interesting and then secondly to understand why your work/result is an important step towards answering that question. I've seen far too many talks scheduled for short lengths (less than 20 minutes) that try to be "fair" or "comprehensive" in their reviews and don't spend that much time talking about their own work. 

For a 5 minute talk in my field, my advice to students is to just pick ONE thing out of the many things they did that they want to highlight. Figure out the minimum background necessary to make this one thing interesting and present that. For a 15-20 min talk, it's enough to present the main results and conclusions of one paper or the over-arching themes of a series of papers, so you might have 3 ideas you want the audience to leave with.

But in almost all cases, don't feel that you need to explain everything or that you should be using your time slot as a way to educate people about your field. Your time slot is your chance to advertise your work. Educational talks are usually those long invited review talks given by those with long established research histories that don't need advertising so they can spend 40 minutes talking about everyone else's work instead of their own.