Interim presentation guidelines
Contents
Interim presentation guidelines¶
Schedule¶
The presentation schedule is shown below. Presentations in both weeks will take place on Monday.
Week |
Time |
NH1105 |
Building 434 |
|---|---|---|---|
10 |
2:00 - 2:20 |
ERI |
Sprague |
10 |
2:20 - 2:40 |
Appfolio |
CalCOFI |
10 |
2:40 - 3:00 |
Carpe Data |
Evidation (Eric) |
11 |
4:00 - 4:20 |
Evidation (Julio) |
PwC |
11 |
4:20 - 4:40 |
HG Insights |
Allthenticate |
11 |
4:40 - 5:00 |
NRI |
CITS |
11 |
5:00 - 5:20 |
ENVENT |
CCBER |
Groups are expected to be in attendance in the room they present in during both sessions. Time slots are shown as 20-minute intervals; this includes the 10-minute presentation, discussion, and transition to the next group.
Content¶
The objective of these presentations is to share your project with a broader segment of the class and get suggestions and feedback that could prove helpful to you moving forward during Spring term. These are meant to be informal and you aren’t expected to have achieved any conclusive results at this stage; it is fine – helpful, in fact! – if you are still finding direction in your project.
For presenters¶
Your group is allocated a 20-minute time slot, but presentations should be about 10 minutes; it is recommended that just one or two of your team members speak during this time. The remaining time will be dedicated to questions, discussion, and suggestions; thus, the more time your group spends presenting, the less time you will have to gather input.
You are encouraged to prepare your presentation with the aim of facilitating discussion and gathering feedback that will actually benefit your work. Thus, the more efficiently you direct attention to the open questions surrounding your work, the more likely you are to benefit from class discussion. To get there, you’ll need to cover the following:
Introduction. Introduce your group and your sponsor and your project domain. If any special background is needed to understand your project, do explain, but resist the urge to over-contextualize – focus only on crucial background and try to get to your work as quickly as possible.
Data. Dedicate a few minutes to carefully describe the dataset(s) you’re working with (note that description is more basic than explanation or summary). Be specific but don’t get lost in minutiae. Often it can help to show an example row or two so the audience can see your data in tabular layout.
Current efforts and goals. Try to convey a sense of what you have learned so far and where you would like to be in a few weeks’ time. How you do this depends on your specific project, but show us a result or two and describe some steps you’ve taken already. Tell us something you’ve learned about the data or a tool or pipeline you’ve built. Then tell us where you’re heading. Remember that you’ll have a limited amount of time, so focus on just one or two of your most important accomplishments and goals.
For listeners¶
Half of the presentation time slot is allocated for discussion, so as you are listening you should be considering whether there is useful input you can offer. This could come in a few forms.
Ask clarifying questions if you get lost during the presentation. We don’t want to slow the presenter down too much, but if there’s a seemingly central detail that you’re getting hung up on, chime in. The presenter will tell you if they would prefer to loop back to the matter during discussion.
Offer encouragement. Affirm an effort or idea that you thought was clever or interesting or promising. Too often we skip over this. “I really liked how you did such-and-such and wouldn’t have thought to do that.”
Suggest something to look into further. If you were on the team what would you do next? Is there a method that they haven’t considered? A resource that you know of that they might find helpful? Something that jumped out to you among their initial results?
Suggestions¶
Here are some practical suggestions in preparing your presentations.
Make use of your website posts. Treat this as raw material and consider developing slides that summarize the post content.
Don’t try to present everything you’ve done. Pick one or two of the most important things and present them clearly.
Make use of the visualization and storytelling workshopping we have done in class for communicating findings.
Assume that you will spend at least one minute, and more likely two, per slide you prepare. That means 5 slides is likely to fill 10 minutes.
Consider having only one or two team members handle the presentation. Switching speakers can often be a little jarring for the audience and can also consume time.
Consider making ‘supplementary’ slides with any nonessential information or additional results that you think might come in handy during Q&A and discussion.
Practice at least once with a friend or your teammates and time the presentation.
Allocate as much of your ~10 minutes as possible to discussing inital efforts and goals. Cover only the background and data description that is absolutely necessary to contextualize your efforts and objectives.
Consider posing specific questions to the group that you’d like feedback or input on.
Logistics¶
Materials. To make transitions quickly from group to group in class, we’ll put all materials in a single folder and control the presentations from one machine. When your slides are ready please upload them to this drive folder and use the following naming convention:
[ROOM] + _ + [PRESENTATION WEEK ] + _ + [ TEAM NAME ]
For example, nh1105_week10_eri.pdf. Please upload slides in either PDF, HTML, or Google Slides format.
Locations. Presenations will be in our usual classroom (NH1105) and in a seminar room in a lab space (BLDG434). The latter is located in a trailer complex directly across the lawn from Storke Tower, and has the building number directly above the entrance. Please go directly to the appropriate room and arrive 5 minutes early.