Some tips on giving talks, for students – plus a 20-minute talk on “Reversing the dust charge polarity in a plasma afterglow”

Professor John Goree; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa

This seminar will be different from most. It will mainly be an audience discussion of tips on how to give oral presentations, This discussion is intended especially for students, to build skills for scientific presentations. It will also include a short talk that I’ll give on dusty plasmas.

We’ll start our meeting with an audience discussion about what makes a talk easy vs difficult to understand. Everyone’s suggestions are welcome. Then I will give a short talk on charging of dust particles in the first millisecond after turning off the power that sustained a glow-discharge plasma, and how a particle’s charge can be controlled by timing the application of potentials to a nearby electrode. This short talk will be a tangible example that we can criticize. Some of the points we’ll mention include identifying the audience’s interest, slide design, segues between slides, what to say when presenting a graph, eye contact, vocal variety, and using a pointer.