Life as a Scientist – Elizabeth C. Lee

Every year in the first weekend of February, the Georgetown Biology department hosts a Graduate Research Symposium. All second-year and above graduate students and postdocs are typically asked to present a 10 minute research talk. The purpose of the symposium is to showcase graduate student and postdoctoral research to current faculty and students and to prospective students visiting the department. Graduate students also organize the events of the day — from designing the schedule, to ordering the breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to creating a snazzy abstract booklet.

Our annual symposium was this past Saturday, and it was a huge success. Besides one small coffee emergency, everything ran smoothly. As one of the main organizers for this year’s event, we also chose to implement a new feature — a feedback form for the presenters. Four faculty members were anonymously assigned to review graduate student talks and other audience members were asked to review two talks per session (out of six) without assignment. Forms included questions about: 1) the presentation of research ideas (did you understand the… background, methods, figures, conclusions?), and 2) the presentation style (were the slides and oral presentation easy to follow?).

There was an average of 7-8 responses per presenter and 18 presenters. Presenters in the two morning sessions tended to get more feedback responses than presenters in the single afternoon session. Graduate students received many more responses than post-doctoral presenters.

It’s unclear whether the feedback will be useful. As a reviewer, I found it difficult to keep up with the evaluation and listen to the next presenter’s talk (even with a short 10 question form). We’ll likely shorten the survey to one page and leave a single open comment section at the bottom, in order to improve the quality of feedback.

I’m curious to hear whether other departments implement a feedback system for graduate student talks. We’re a broad audience and few labs are “in the same field”. Does this detract from the quality of the feedback we can receive from our colleagues?

For those interested, a copy of the feedback form we used at the symposium is below.

Georgetown Biology GRS 2016 – presenter feedback form

Update 11/10/15 evening:

On a related note, I came across this post on preparing scientific posters in LaTeX. It seems that there are packages (TikZ, for instance) allowing you to create graphics directly in TeX too. I recently had the opportunity to make a scientific poster, so maybe I’ll write another post about that experience. (I did it in PowerPoint and there were some technical difficulties!)

I am planning to come back to my examples with the R dplyr package in the next post, but I wanted to discuss the use of Beamer and LaTeX to make scientific presentations. I am preparing for my yearly Work-in-Progress seminar in the Biology department this week and I have been making my 45 minute presentation in Beamer. I was reflecting earlier this week on some of the pros and cons of using Beamer.

Background (aside): I’ve used Beamer for all of my previous formal seminars, but I typically use the Google Drive app, Google Slides, for informal talks at lab meeting or journal club. I have also used Prezi for class lectures and class presentations. I kicked off my graduate seminar career with Beamer because I thought it would be a good opportunity to play with LaTeX and learn a new skill and I’ve continued at it since then. My presentations are not particularly filled with mathematical notation, so LaTeX only benefits me minimally in this regard.

Pros:

creates presentations that are visually compelling
easy to replace layouts that can completely change your presentation in seconds
simple, pre-specified formatting that can be applied with commands
copying and pasting slides or specific content between presentations is simple since it is mostly independent of broader formatting choices
relatively simple insertion and copying of mathematical notation — you can even turn specific terms into commands that may be easily called in multiple places in the file.
you can turn your presentation into a document draft or slide handout with changes to a few words (with \documentclass)

Cons:

must be compiled, which takes additional time when creating and formatting content
figures must be kept in a central location or copied with every Beamer presentation since the files are not embedded (as in PPT)
formatting is fussy –> I know LaTeX typesetting is supposed to make things easier, but it’s tricky to make a slide look nice with multiple figures and text blocks without some manual formatting (If someone else knows how to do this, please let me know!)

Verdict: I would not recommend the use of Beamer for everyone or for all occasions. If you want to make a quick and dirty presentation, use PowerPoint or Google Slides for the WYSIWYG interface because it’s easier to move figures around and add bubbles or text boxes in specific places. If you are going to reuse content a lot and incorporate lots of mathematical but want to have some flexibility with background layouts and color schemes, Beamer might be a nice option. These features could benefit professors that reuse slides in various courses or for different lecture topics.

Other alternatives:

I’ve used Lyx software for writing TeX documents, which has some nice WYSIWYG software features but preserves the transportability by providing underlying TeX code. I would be curious to know whether this interfaces works similarly well for making presentations.
I briefly mentioned my use of Prezi earlier in my aside. Prezi can make attractive, dynamic visual presentations and enables the “intuitive” spatial organization of presentation concepts. I used the web version of the tool and I found the interface to be a little clunky. It took a long time for me to create lectures because I needed to create a mental concept map of the presentation before putting any of it on the page. It is, however, great for visual learners and keeping the attention of antsy students.

I’m no expert, so I am hoping to try out some new presentation tools next time I give a talk.

Additional Beamer resources:

I recently discovered relative slide specification and additional commands in the vein of \visible and \only on another blog called “Some TeX Developments”.
I frequently consult the LaTeX wikibooks page, particularly for table formatting and general formatting

Category: Life as a Scientist

feedback on student presentations

Beamer for presentations