As part of your M.S. Project, you’ll be doing an online presentation/seminar to accompany the project itself. You should use Yuja (free software available to UNL students, using this helps keep seminars consistent) to create narrated Powerpoints. You should cover the following aspects of the project:
- Why you chose this project
- Summary of what the project is about
- Steps you took to create the project
- Results or outcomes of the project
- What you have learned from doing the project
- Future directions, including how the project can be used by either you or others
In your presentation, please include photos, graphs, illustrations, tables, etc. that relate to your project. Also include any references you use for the presentation on the end slide and cite/credit all references or photos within the body of the presentation.
In general, your seminar should be no more than 45 min, and you can talk about your experience creating the project and how you handled setbacks, but the meat of your presentation should be about what your question/ topic was, what you did to answer it and what you found, and what you learned entomology-wise.
Seminar Presentation Tips
Below are some presentation tips for the seminar, including how to develop slides and tips for presenting.
Slides
- Bullets: No more than 5 bullets per slide and no more than 5-8 words per bullet
- Font: use the same font throughout the slides, not smaller than 24 (can be smaller for references and pictures credits), no sans-serif, and bold
- Figures: Thick lines on graphs (2 pt) and all axes should have a line
- Pictures: provide credit, and when you paste them, do not make them bigger as they will get blurry
- Color: good color contrast and be mindful of color-blind individuals in the audience
- Recreate tables/figures from papers that might be blurry when you paste them and give credit (i.e., “adapted from this paper”)
- Add references
Presentation
- Start early
- Think about your audience, the best way to start is with an outline
- Work on your slide transitions
- Continually think about the flow of your presentation and be prepared to make changes when you practice.
- Rehearse your presentation, but not too many times that you sound unexcited and like a robot
- Try to explain or present to family members or friends
- Keep eye contact (i.e., camera)
- Use the inflection of your voice to draw attention
- Do not read directly from your slides. Try to paraphrase and use what is written as a reference
- Avoid filler words
- Think about the main message(s) you want your audience the get from your presentation and repeat it multiple times
- Plan for roughly one slide per minute