*Nasal-y voice*
Hey readers!
So, last week, I came down with some crazy congestion/illness which severely altered my voice and gave me some headaches. But, not to fear, it's crunch-time, so I kept plugging through it. I gave 2 practice presentations last week, one on Tuesday and one on Saturday.
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| Literally, how I looked after blowing my nose all day and not sleeping. |
For Tuesday, I started out on fire 🔥 , but then following an infamous drop of the clicker (ask Mrs. Haag -- it shattered into exactly 1,000,000 pieces), things went off the rails a bit. It wasn't the clicker, but the organization of my presentation that caused the issues. As I referenced last week, I simply broke my slides up into 3LCAA and Ion Beam Analysis. By splitting by analysis technique, I was trying to minimize repeated explanations of the same methods and stick to chronology.
However, the transitions between the experiment and the analysis of the results were lacking, causing me to lose my wonderful audience of Dr. Scaling, Mr. Lester, Ms. Conner, and Mrs. Haag. Moreover, I was discussing implications right with the data, and I didn't have broader conclusions at the end of each section, so my audience couldn't keep track of all the conclusions I was making until I showed them my last few slides. Like most issues with explanations of my project that happened this year (let's get reflective one week early), it stemmed from my complete immersion in my project and the data, which a normal person couldn't understand from my explanations. For a greater understanding of my results and to hit all those points on the rubric, I needed to connect my results to their significance more (e.g., IBA spectra and overlays to UNIFORMITY).
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| It's never good when your audience looks like this when you're presenting data. |
As you can imagine, making such amateur mistakes was frustrating, so I had to go back to the drawing board.
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| Rip. |
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Going into Saturday, I needed a real re-organization and re-framing of the Methods --> Results --> Discussion sections. After talking to Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag, I decided to frame my entire research with 3 questions, and then divide my presentation into 3 sections based on these questions (It's "HemaDrop™ It Like It's Hot" after all, I couldn't give you a blog post without some technical information 😉 ):
1. Can hyper-hydrophilic coatings dry a blood droplet quickly into thin solid films? (Optical Observations)
2. If so, are the blood thin solid films created uniform in composition? (Ion Beam Analysis)
3. If so, what parameters optimize hyper-hydrophilicity to maximize uniformity and feasibility? (3LCAA)
Based on these questions, the clear goal of each experiment is articulated before, and I answer each question after each section. This organization worked much better, and my presentation on Saturday was much improved (only 2 minutes over and way clearer).
RIP 3LCAA table (I took out a wildly confusing and variously colored table of values lol). You had a good run, but ultimately, my bar graph conveyed all the information you said and more. If you want to see the infamous table, you can read my paper!
However, there is still work to be done! Dr. Herbots and Mrs. Haag both stated that they wanted a clearer connection to implications when I present data, so I have been working on putting in graphics, which appear as talk connecting specific aspects of the results to the implications for answering the questions. Moreover, I need to transition better between the research questions, as Mrs. Haag said that it was really clear within each section, but why we could move on to each new one was confusing. I anticipate adding a better transition slide between sections.
Practicing has been going well, as it has allowed me to try out different types of slides and make changes. But I think I've established the best organization for my presentation, so most slide-editing should end by Monday. Then, I can hone in on my delivery, which has been pretty good and natural so far.
Interestingly, Dr. Herbots loved the new organization so much that she suggested changing my paper to fit this organization, which has really helped my word count. I am close to 5500 words now, and still can streamline a few more sections. Monday and Tuesday are major crunch-times for cutting my paper and making sure it's my best work.
Last week! And I think we're in pretty good shape.
As an FYI, my final presentation is THIS Friday (!), which is April 14, from 6 - 6:30 pm, so, as a loyal reader, you're invited to hear me talk about what I've done this year and some cool results.
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| FRIDAY NIGHT! |
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| Please! |
See you there!
Yash
(767)
🔑 🚨
Hey Yash! Sounds like you had a lot of editing to do for your presentation, but you have been staying on top of it (as per usual). Nice! I didn't have to do as much reorganizing, but I can relate in terms of adding more slides, transitioning, animations, and explicit bullets to make all my points clearer and more engaging for the audience. I really like how you created three questions as the baseline for your presentation to make it easy for the audience to follow. In terms of creating more graphics and adding to the presentation this week, make sure you stay on top of it, because the process is more tedious than you might think (and once you change things, I am realizing that it takes a little time to adapt your verbal presentation to complicated animations). Speaking of which, how do you feel about the verbal aspects of your presentation? I am sure that you will end up delivering well, but make sure you keep practicing that as well! Good luck with the final edits -- we are almost there!! :)
ReplyDeleteHey Yash! I hope you are feeling better!! Even just reading this blogpost I feel like posing those questions makes your argument so much more clear since it links results to purpose immediately. Therefore the reader is constantly engaged with the purpose of each experiment. Like Dr. Helmers (or herbots as i think autocorrected), this probably is very useful in your paper and I'm glad this is helping your word count. Since you do have so much information, you gotta keep those slides organized! Do you feel like this new organization helps you organize results and conclusions better? You said that the first time the audience got lost with conclusions, so does answering each question as a conclusion for that experiment work as a better way to organize conclusions? Keep up the great work Yash!
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ReplyDeleteI think that you're going to have a big crew come out for your presentation, especially since you put out this pathetic invitation at the end of your blog post. I do agree that you have a more-streamlined approach, but I also think that you need to be sure to have a strong justification for the relevance of the 3LCAA analysis, as the previous chronological order no longer follows. Please reach out if you're still struggling with finding the relevance of this data (particularly for the Si wafers).
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