Course description:

You will train techniques in the three essential areas of convincing scientific talks:
1. Prepare Clear Content
Many scientific presentations suffer from too little clarity and too much content. The result is a lecturer running through the slides, losing the audience at the very beginning. You should instead learn to deliver a clear presentation by setting dis-tinct goals and finding vivid examples that make your talk memorable.

2. Design Proper Slides
Today's leading standard for visualization in scientific presentations is Power-Point: a powerful tool, however, often poorly used. Lecturers frequently try to re-mind themselves what they wanted to say by reading their own bullets – thereby facing the projection screen instead of their audience. With overfilled, graphically cluttered, visually incoherent slides they try to support their speech. Do better!

3. Be Convincing on Stage
With your body language and spoken word stands or falls your talk. Aside valuable content you must be able to deliver it in a convincing way that motivates your au-dience to follow you. Many great researchers miss this chance and obligation. You will give an example of your talk, receive feedback, learn from a video recording of it, and you will know how to do better, if necessary. We will train for onsite and online talks.

Content
•Prepare clear content: audience focus, take home message, etc.
•How to start and end well
•Telling a vivid story: Creating Brain Cinema
•The Six Golden Rules of Slide Design (How many words? How many slides? What background and fonts? …)
•PowerPoint tech tips (slide masters, Smart Art, etc. No full introduction)
•Body language: where to put your hands – and other questions
•Answers to your questions

Methods
Mixture of trainer input, practical exercises, participants’ presentations, and dis-cussion. Each participant will conduct a short 3-5 minutes’ presentation twice (an excerpt of a larger one), receive feedback by peers and trainer and learn from a video recording. Participants need to send in samples of own slides and their learning goals before the seminar. Also, they need to prepare for their short talk.

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This workshop  is part of the transferable skills portfolio of the PIER Education platform on the science campus Bahrenfeld/DESY. The workshops are usually one-day courses for a maximum number of 12-15 participants and are offered once or twice a year. The trainers are carefully selected experts with many years of experience in teaching scientists. Some of the workshops are open for postdocs.

The workshops offered in the PIER Education Platform are a cooperation between the PIER Helmholtz Graduate School and its partner organisations and institutes Quantum Universe Research School QURS, the Collaborative Research Center SFB 925, The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging CUI, the International Max Planck Research School for Ultrafast Imaging & Structural Dynamics IMPRS-UFAST, DASHH, the Centre for Structural Systems Biology CSSB, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory EMBL and HELIOS.