Delivering a great thesis presentation is not easy, but there are some tricks you can use to make sure that your audience can at least remember the most important message. Here are five tips to get you started!
Key points
The aim of a thesis presentation is to communicate a message to your audience. Always keep this in mind when preparing. Ask yourself: what is it that I want my audience to understand or remember? This post discusses five tips for an effective thesis presentation:
- Determine your take-home message: what should your audience remember from your presentation?
- Repeat your take-home message.
- Start with your acknowledgements, and end with your take-home message. Not the other way around.
- Keep it simple. Bring it down to the essence and skip all unnecessary details.
- Be silent! Use breaks to allow your audience to digest what you just said.
1. Determine the take-home message of your thesis presentation
Before you start making your presentation, it is important to determine what your audience should pick up from your talk. This is called your take-home message. The take-home message should be simple, clear, and relatively short. In a way, the take-home message summarizes the conclusion of the work you’re presenting. You can use a couple of bullet points, or (even better!) show a figure that summarizes your most important conclusions. A good example of a (written) take-home message is:
- Students that participate actively in class are more likely to pass the course
- Active participation activates long-term memory
This is a good take-home message, because it is short, written in an active way, and easy to understand. Make sure that it is clear to the audience when you are delivering your take-home message. It helps if you are very explicit about it, for example by adding a slide with the title “Take-home message”. No room for confusion there.
2. Repeat your take-home message
Repetition is key for memorizing, and helps to make you thesis presentation effective. So if you want your audience to remember your take-home message, you have to repeat it. This of course does not mean that you need to repeat the same slide 3 times in your presentation, but you can do it in a clever way. A helpful quote:
Tell them what you are going to tell them (1), then tell them (2), and then tell them what you told them (3). – Aristotle and others
So how does this work in practice? In the first part of your talk, you introduce your topic, and you tell the audience what your talk is about. You can end this part by giving your take-home message for the first time: “In this presentation, I will show that [enter take-home message here].” Sometimes it may be a good idea to already present the slide with your full take-home message here. Alternatively, you could only give a little glimpse of it, so that your audience will be intrigued and interested in what you have to say further.
In the second part of your talk, you give the information that your take-home message is based on. You try to convince your audience of your take-home message by building on arguments. For a presentation on your research, this part usually contains the most important results of your study. While making your presentation, keep in mind that all the results you show should be important for your take-home message (see section 4. Keep it simple).
In the third part of your talk, you summarize the most important results, and you clearly show that these results naturally lead to your take-home message. At this point, you should not present any new results! The goal is to bring focus to the most important message of your presentation, and to make sure that it is clear to the audience what they should remember.
3. Start your thesis presentation with acknowledgements
Many presenters use their last slide to thank contributors and funders, or they may even include a slide that says “Questions?”. That slide will be up there for the remainder of the discussion. Although acknowledging your colleagues is important, it is not what you want the audience to remember for your talk. It’s a much better idea to show your take-home message while you are answering questions. This allows the audience to digest your most important conclusions, and makes it more likely that they will remember it.
So when should you present your acknowledgements? Personally I think this should be done at the start of the talk, but do not spend too much time on it. Yes, acknowledgements are important, but not nearly as important as the actual content of your presentation. So it’s best to just get it out of the way early on.
4. Keep your thesis presentation simple
Your research project probably took several months or years to complete, and there have been many challenges, difficult decisions, and mistakes along the way. Furthermore, there are many details that are important to include in your report or research article, such as details of the experimental setup, the data collection, or the statistical analyses. However, not all details are important enough to include in your presentation. Your time to present is usually quite limited, so make sure to focus on the most important conclusions (there’s the take-home message again), and only present information that supports that message.
For every piece of information that you consider to include in your presentation, ask yourself: “Does the audience really have to know about this in order to understand my message, or to be convinced of its validity?” If the answer is no, you should probably not include it. You may be tempted to include information just to show the audience how difficult your study was. Try to prevent that. Unnecessary details can make your presentation very cluttered, and negatively affect the clarity of your take home message. Just focus on what the audience really needs to know. A simple rule that may help to make simple slides is the 5/5/5 rule (click here).
5. Be silent!
The last tip for an effective presentation is to be silent. That may sound weird, but what I mean is to that you should regularly stop talking for a few (2-3) seconds. These breaks allow the audience to digest what you have just said. In addition, you can use breaks to mark a transition from one topic to the next, or to emphasize important information.
It can feel very awkward to not say anything for a couple of seconds, especially if you’re a bit nervous. At first, it may feel like everyone is staring at you, waiting for you to continue speaking. Rest assured, if you take breaks purposefully, it will not come across as awkward or weird. For you, the moments of silence can feel like an eternity, while for the audience, they are a welcome break to the constant flow of information. Just try it out, and you will get used to it as you practice.
Conclusion
With these five tips, you’re well underway to delivering an effective thesis presentation. Remember that in preparing your presentation, you should keep in mind what the purpose of your talk is. The ultimate aim is to communicate your take home message as clearly as possible.
