General advice

You will often need to present: in courses, for a thesis defense, for your colleagues, at a conference. There are several guidelines to make these presentation effective, which we will cover in this section. At this page we start with some general presentation guidelines.

Intended for: BSc, MSc, PhD

1. Pick a good slide programme. 

• I prefer to use Google Slides. It's easily accesible from everywhere, and let's you make clear slides. 

• When you have a lot of formulas, you might consider the beamer package in LaTeX. However, I'm not a fan at all: LaTeX is good for automatic typesetting, which is highly preferable in all your written documents. However, for a presentation you actually require a different lay-out for every slide, and Latex in my experience becomes a hindrance. (Do write equations in Latex and copy-paste them into your slides though.)

• There is more fancy presentation software, such as Prezi. However, I usually find the fancy transitions distracting rather than helpful. 

2. Pick a nice slide lay-out. 

 Don't make your presentation with the default black-arial-letters-on-white-background: it directly signals you did not really make an effort. Take half an hour once to pick/build a nice slide design for all your future presentations. 

• I advise to stick with a relatively light background color and a darker font color. Pick a nice font, adjust the font size so you can write ~5-6 bullet points per slide (so people in the back can still read it). 

• And very important: don't overdo the design either, adding all kinds of distractions. Your slides should be calm/clean, yet convey quality/effort. 

• Here you find a slide template I often use myself. Not saying it is perfect, but it suffices for me. 

3. Do practice, but never memorize/practice the exact presentation text.

This is really the worst idea ever. We all know these presentations where the speaker has exactly memorized every word, and is just monotonically repeating these. It's your best bet to lose all attention. 

• This does not mean you should not practice your talk: you actually should practice. However, you need a different way to remember your story (see next item). 

4. Instead, make your own slides your guide (cheat sheet) through your talk. 

Some people bring a cheatsheet, either on paper or at their laptop screen, to remember every detail they really really need to mention at a specific slide. Don't do this. Everybody is looking at your slides, and you are as well, so you get your cheat sheet for free! Simply make your own slides your guideline through your own talk. 

• Design your slides in such a way that they automatically structure your entire story: just popping in the next item on a slide reminds you where you needed to go next. Always write out the point you are trying to make in a few words: this reminds you what point you wanted to make here, and also directly signals the content of your argument to the audience. 

• It will be very easy for them to follow your story, since you are essentially jointly walking through your own cheat sheet.