Final Year Project Defense: Tips to a Successful Presentation

Final Year Project Defense

Why Worry Giving a Good Presentation?

• First impressions matter!
• There’s no point doing good work if others don’t know about it or can’t understand what you did.
• Good practice for a teaching career! Good practice for any career!
• Helps you sort out what you’ve done, and understand it better yourself.

Types of Presentations

• Quick 1-minute “what I do” talk
• 25 minute conference paper presentation
• Project presentation (defense)
• Thesis defense
• Job talk

What they have in common:

• Never enough time to talk about everything
• All of them reflect on you & need practice/polish
• Focus on a clear goal and message.

Top 10 Points for a Good Presentation

• Be neat
• Avoid trying to cram too much into one slide
  • Don’t be a slave to your slides.
• Be brief
  • use keywords rather than long sentences
• Avoid covering up slides
• Use a large font
• Use color to emphasize
• Use illustrations to get across key concepts
  • You may want include limited animation
• Make eye contact
• Be ready to skip slides if time is short
• Practice !!

A “typical” Project Presentation Outline

• Title/author/affiliation (1 slide)
• Forecast (1 slide) Give gist of problem attacked and insight found
• Outline (1 slide)
• Background
  • Motivation and Problem Statement (1-2 slides)
  • Related Work (0-1 slides)
  • Methods (1-3 slides) Explain your approach; illustrate algorithm
• Results (2-6 slides) Present key results and key insights. This is main body of the talk, but don’t try to show ALL results.
• Summary (1 slide)
• Future Work (0-1 slides)
• Backup Slides (0-3 slides) Optionally have a few slides ready to answer expected questions.

Other Important Things to Consider

• Oral communication is different from written communication
  • Keep it simple and focus on a few key points
  • Repeat key insights
• Be sensitive to your audience
  • The same talk may need to be adjusted for a different audience
• Make the audience want to learn more
• Handling Questions and Answers is as important as the formal talk itself

How to Improve your Presentation?

• Practice by yourself
• Practice in front of friends
• Practice in front of a webcam
  • Watch footage later… alone… as painful as that may be!
• Take note of effective speakers and adopt their successful habits

Expressing yourself technically helps you make and use professional connections wisely