Tips for Final Presentation#
The final presentation should highlight your discoveries, both expected and unexpected. You will want to focus on the visualizations and tell a story.
Here are some presentation tips:
Provide a summary of what the presentation is about. Essentially, tell the audience what you’re going to tell them. This will include:
Context : Provide necessary background so the audience can understand the presentation.
Underlying Motivation : Express why should we care. If you have nothing motivating, just skip it. It’s too late now!
Research Results : Don’t present the questions, just give the results. This may include that some research was inconclusive.
Focus on the visualizations and key takeaways. Hopefully the graphs are creative and insightful, and they may require some explanation or setup. The visualizations may have annotations that highlight key points or areas in the graph that deserve attention. Explain what conclusions one can draw from each graph.
Tell a story about your research and your experience.
Inform us of a discovery from a particular visualization that inspired new questions and directions.
If there was something particularly fun or difficult, it can make the presentation more relatable.
Explain how your research changed as you gained a better understanding of your topic. This can provide insightful information to the audience. It also adds layers and nuances to your final presentation.
Demonstrate interactive graphs or animations. If you took the time to create interactive graphs, demonstrate them. This can often be easiest if you create a video of the interactions instead of worrying about installing software.
Future work or future directions for this project. Most likely you ran out of time to research everything. Or, perhaps you discovered tangential research that is deserving of attention.
There are several things you want to avoid:
Do NOT review your Methodology. Discussing the methodology was a necessary component in the initial Proposal Document to assure that you had given your project sufficient thought and that you have a plan.
Do NOT detail the structure of your data. You may discuss the data as it pertains to understanding the results of your data (or lack thereof). But, no one wants to see the ugly details.