In preparing your 20 min presentation
- realize the importance of being hyper-efficient
- go straight to the heart of things, no wasting time
- cap the number of slides at 12 (13 including then cover slide)
- anticipate that you will only get to talk for 15 mins and spend the other 5 mins answering questions
- put the paper’s “research question” on the very first slide, with at most 1 or 2 bullet points of motivation/context ahead of it.
I highly encourage you to get in the following frame of mind when putting the presentation together: “If there is 1, and ONLY 1, thing we need to learn from this presentation/paper what would that be?”
- what’s the key contribution
- why the paper is worth publishing
- In a theoretically-oriented paper, that would be the key mechanism and discussion about how the modeling of that mechanism is cool/novel/elegant in this paper.
- In an empirical paper, it would be what is the key identification assumption and what is it about this approach/data that makes it possible and cool/novel.
Finally, remember that you will be the only person in the room to have read the paper; the rest of us will be in the dark about it. So your level of understanding of the topic will be that of an expert, and ours of ignorants. Your job is to get “out of your own head” and bridge that knowledge gap.