A Comprehensive Guide for Public Speaking at Scientific Conferences
May 16, 2017 4 Comments
Introduction
I served as a judge for some of the student presentations at the 2016 Canadian Statistics Student Conference (CSSC). The conference was both a learning opportunity and a networking opportunity for statistics students in Canada. The presentations allowed the students to share their research and course projects with their peers, and it was a chance for them to get feedback about their work and learn new ideas from other students.
Unfortunately, I found most of the presentations to be very bad – not necessarily in terms of the content, but because of the delivery. Although the students showed much earnestness and eagerness in sharing their work with others, most of them demonstrated poor competence in public speaking.
Public speaking is an important skill in knowledge-based industries, so these opportunities are valuable experiences for anybody to strengthen this skill. You can learn it only by doing it many times, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. Having delivered many presentations, learned from my share of mistakes, and received much praise for my seminars, I hope that the following tips will help anyone who presents at scientific conferences to improve their public-speaking skills. In fact, most of these tips apply to public speaking in general.
Image courtesy of Peter Macdonald on Flickr.
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