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Making a Slide Talk

Slides to Include in a Capstone Presentation

In the following order:

Slide Count Content
Title 1 Punchline Title (give away the ending), Your name, Your Mentor’s Name.
Acknowledgments 1 Lab members, Your committee members, the MHA program
Background 1-2 Discuss the anatomy involved, what is known about your problem
Previous Results 1-2 the Previous work or results that directly motivated your research
Rationale 1 What is not known and what still needs to be done
Hypothesis 1 Write out your hypothesis
Methods 1-2 Optional. An overview of the methods but not too much detail
Results 1+ Show your results, probably more than one slide
Conclusions 1 Summarize your results
Discussion 1-2 tell your audience what your results mean, future directions
Questions 1 Questions?

General Guidelines

Software

You can use any slide deck software you like. Powerpoint is, of course, the most popular, but Apple Keynote is also popular with the Mac set, and I have also seen many talks create with Google Slides.

Reconfigure from a Poster

You don't need to start from scratch if you already created a poster. Simply reconfigure the images and information from your poster.

Slide Organization

The overall organization of a talk often employs the Three Tells:

  1. Tell your audience what you are going to tell them
  2. Tell them what you did
  3. Tell your audience what you just told them.

Also, more generally, you should use the following the tried-and-true organization:

  • background
  • previous results
  • results
  • conclusions

Visuals

Just like a poster, your slide deck should mostly be composed of images. Words are boring.

Know Your Audience

For the capstone presentation, you will have a general audience. So, present with the assumption that most people will know very little about your working on. That means that you need to have good basic background. You really to set up the problem in an easy to understand manner.

Hand Hold Your Audience

  • Don't be afraid to keep it really basic
  • Your background should start from the beginning (don't assume prior knowledge)
  • Keep your talk short and to the point
  • Have a logical order to your slides.
  • The information of a given slide should logically follow the information presented on the previous slide.
  • e.g. set-up a question or a problem and then solve that problem in the next slide
  • Have good transitions between slides

Practice

Practice, Practice, Practice.

You should have this talk memorized backwards and forwards.

Know your audience

Keep it short and to the point Have great transitions between slides hand-hold your audience. Walk them through the talk. Don’t be afraid of keeping it real basic Practice, Practice, Practices

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