On 26 September I had the opportunity to give a short talk at the COSTNET18 conference in Warsaw. I’d never done anything like it before, which made it both exciting and a tiny bit terrifying. I thought I’d share how I prepared for it, in the hope that other conference newbies might find some of it useful, or at least funny.

20 July

I register for the conference, and apply to give a talk. I use a version of my paper draft abstract, to which I add a couple of introductory sentences. I submit successfully, but at the end of the day accidentally delete this version of the abstract from my computer. I guess if I need it, I just need to wait until the conference programme becomes available. #fail

7 August

OPIG goes to the pub to decide on the next group meeting rota. In one of my braver moments, I ask for the slot immediately before the conference in order to practise this talk, which I may or may not be giving. I have the best intention to do a lot of prep work before then (spoilers: this doesn’t quite happen).

5 September

Exscientia, a drug design company which recently moved next door, come for a visit. Charlotte had asked, with plenty of notice, that some of us prepare ten minute presentations on our work. Naturally, I made some slides at the very last minute. I’m pretty sure I overran, but I’m also pretty sure I wasn’t the only one.

8 September (+/- a couple of days)

A version of the conference programme appears online. I find out I’ve been scheduled for a short talk, but I don’t know how short is short.

I use some of the advanced skills I gained during my maths and stats undergrad, and divide the allocated time slot by the number of speakers. I have to do this several times, since counting is something I still struggle with, much like spellinq. Eventually I figure out I have about seven minutes. I decide this translates to a five minute talk, plus maybe one question, plus a bit of faff time. Gesine agrees with my hypothesis and I feel smug about this feat of inference.

16-18 September

The OPIG practice run for my talk is on the 18th, so I raid my Exscientia slides for a first draft of my presentation. I make five slides (plus a title slide), because I’ve been to enough workshops to know the slide-per-minute rule.

I also google how many words go into a five minute talk, and find out that people speak at a rate of 125 to 150 words per minute, meaning I’m allowed between 625 and 750 words. I aim for 700, knowing that in reality I’ll overshoot and push it closer to 750.

I write a first draft of my talk out, section by section, and it reaches 727 words. I pat myself on the shoulder for keeping it below 750 and do my best to memorise it before group meeting.

18 September

I practise the talk at OPIG. I haven’t learnt it well enough, and between my “umms” and “errs”, Garrett’s five minute timer starts quacking before I’m done. I ignore it, and finish my presentation in six and a half minutes.

Aware of my brittle ego, my fellow opiglets are a lot nicer than I feared they might be. I get some really useful feedback. Some of their best suggestions are:

“Learn your talk by heart, even if it seems awkward at first.”

Admittedly, I know that one already, I just haven’t done it properly. We used to memorise poems when I was in school and I’ve hated it ever since. Good advice, though, and it’s definitely a lot easier when it’s my own writing, and I allow myself a little leeway with the phrasing.

“Don’t put too much text on your slides.”

I only have five minutes of the audience’s attention, and if I put a lot on the slides, they’ll be too busy reading to hear what I’m saying. I’m advised to remove one of my slides altogether, because I say all of it anyway.

“Don’t include (multiple) figures.”

This one I really wasn’t expecting! But then again, if I include a figure, I’ll need to explain how to read it — what’s on the x-axis, what’s on the y-axis, what behaviour you can see in the plot, and what implication this has on my work. That’s quite a lot of things to say for a single figure, and it can take a good chunk of my precious time. Since I only included my figures to illustrate how my methodology works, I end up taking them out.

There are a number of other really helpful suggestions and I take a lot of notes.

19-24 September

On the rare occasions when I’m not procrastinating or doing other work, I edit my talk. Naturally, I do the majority of this on the 24th, the day before I leave for Warsaw. I have a low-key panic attack when I realise I’m speaking on Wednesday and not Thursday, as I’d originally thought.

I end up with a five-slide presentation:

• Slide 1: Title. I even remember to put all the logos on it.
• Slide 2: Introduction. This is v.2 of a very ugly picture from my Exscientia talk. It now includes a cute mouse, which represents “underlying biology of interest”, and is altogether slightly less ugly. I’ve remembered to include  image credits which I’d forgotten in my OPIG talk.
• Slide 3: Methods. Rather than putting any actual methods here, I have three bullet points about the three different measures we’ve developed, and a short question under each one explaining the intuition behind it.
• Slide 4: Results. Again three bullet points, corresponding to three different aspects of why my research might be of interest to anyone.
• Slide 5: Summary. I only include this as a background slide for the Q&A afterwards, without planning to talk over it. This will turn out to be unnecessary, but I guess it won’t hurt either.

When I first wrote out my talk, I separated it into sections which didn’t correspond exactly to my slides. Now that I have all the edits, I include the exact slide breaks. My word count is down to 705.

25 September

After a day of travelling and a lovely dinner with James and Javi, I lock myself in my hotel room to practise the talk a few more times (read: I’d barely practised it in Oxford).

I start talking to myself, like the madwoman that I am. I time myself reading. I time myself with the Word document open in front of me, but trying not to read. I time myself not reading. I take anywhere between 4:30 and 5:45 minutes, depending on how much of the text I end up looking at.

I notice, rather late, that I never say anything about how my work might be applicable to other fields, so I add a couple of sentences to the end of my talk. I time myself again.

At some point I realise that I can record myself speaking on my laptop, so I make a few recordings. Like most people, I absolutely hate the sound of my voice when I hear it recorded or altered by a microphone. I listen to it a few times, partly so it doesn’t come as a surprise the following day.

I go to bed miserable, because I don’t know my talk well enough.

26 September

Conference time! I spend most of the morning practically shaking. I take some surprisingly detailed notes, and re-read my talk during the coffee breaks. I also re-read my talk any time the conference speakers go into lengthy maths I can’t quite follow.

When the short talk session finally starts, the chair says we have seven minutes each, and there’s no time for questions. I’m the ninth speaker in the session, and I’m pretty sure I’m the first, or at most the second, to have under ten slides — so much for my slide-per-minute rule. Unlike everyone else, I don’t have a single equation either. And my meager five minute talk includes introducing myself and the people I work with, which no one else has done. After some consideration, I decide to keep that rather than make last minute changes. I remind myself that the audience would be more upset with a late finish than an early one.

I get up to speak, and wonder whether people can see me shaking. The chair tells me he’ll get up when it’s time for me to finish. At this point, I’m not particularly worried about overrunning.

I start talking, and immediately have to check my slides to make sure I don’t get the names of my supervisors wrong. Javi takes a photo at that precise moment.

As I finish talking over my first content slide, I marvel at the fact that I haven’t completely frozen, or said anything too stupid. It’s all going kind of smoothly, I think?

I finish my last slide, and have to say so, because the audience clearly wasn’t expecting my talk to be this short. Did I speak too quickly? Apparently so.

As I move towards my seat I get a thumbs up from Gesine. This means that (a) I look so nervous I obviously need lots of encouragement, and (b) I probably didn’t say anything too embarrassing.

I take my seat and immediately realise I’d forgotten the final addition to my talk about general applicability. Shoot.

27 September

Over lunch, one of the other short talk speakers tells me how I came across as a very confident speaker. I suppress the urge to laugh out loud.