Project Completed!
Well, it’s taken me a while to blog it, but I’ve completed the very last part of my fourth year project, which was a simple 20-25 minute presentation with questions at the end. All in all, it went pretty well. Alan kindly stayed on after he completed his own talk and listened to the ones given in my group. They were quite interesting: the first was on some kind of 2D projection technique to model 3D Navier-Stokes equations, and the other on the spread of disease throughout a tree-like structure.
Most surprising was that I didn’t feel nervous at all; having spent so long typing up the project and fiddling around with code, I knew the algorithms pretty well and I think that I did a good job of summarizing the key aspects. The reaction seemed positive enough, and the questions at the end were reasonably managable.
For anybody who’s going to do this sort of presentation, I’ve collated some handy tips that I found useful.
- Make sure you’re prepared, and have done at least one complete run-through before the talk - preferably in front of others so you can get some feedback.
- Lay out information in a logical, ordered fashion to make the ideas easier to digest.
- Don’t try to cram too much in: I did 20 slides, averaging about 0.8 per minute. This is a bit too much; the “optimum” is about 2 minutes per slide, apparently.
- Be clear when talking and highlight the key points as much as you can.
- When explaining harder ideas, present a simple example to explain the point of the theorem/definition/algorithm.
- Make things pleasent to the eye - for anyone doing a maths project, consider using Beamer and LaTeX to produce pretty PDF slides.
- Finally, if you’re using a projector, make sure you have an OHP backup! Beamer allows you to easily create transparencies, and you can use psnup to concatenate slides.