My top tips for your first conference presentation

Academic conferences can be great for learning about interesting new research, expanding your network (and making new friends!), boosting inspiration, and sometimes even visiting a city or country you’ve never been to before.

But it can also be daunting. It might be the first time you have presented your research to an audience, and not everyone considers public speaking fun. With that in mind, these are the things I wish I had known before going to my first conference.

1. Write a script (but don’t use it)

I still always write out my script for any presentation, word for word. I’ll read through it maybe half a dozen times in the lead-up to the conference (say, the day before you leave, on the plane there, the night before, the morning of, on the way in, and one other just for luck!). But then here’s the trick: you don’t read it out when presenting.

You take it with you and have it on the table in front of you, so if you find yourself completely overcome with nerves, you will not be left floundering. But it is just there as a backup. Nothing is less engaging than having someone stand in front of a room and read directly from a script. By all means, refer to it briefly if you need to – you might like to highlight your key talking points so you can find them quickly. But hopefully, knowing that you have the safety net of the script means that you won’t need it at all.

2. Plan for no more than 100 words/minute

Once you get up there, you will find that time goes quickly. For me, at least, adrenaline and mild terror make time warp in a good way when I’m presenting in front of a crowd. You can’t say a whole lot in 10 or 15 minutes, and timekeeping tends to be strictly enforced by the chair to make sure everyone has a chance to speak.

 A handy guide I use is to multiply however many minutes I speak by 100 – this gives me a word count for my script. So, a 10-minute presentation only gives you 1000 words to play with; a 15-minute presentation is 1500 words. Once you provide a brief overview of the project and perhaps the methods you’re using, and (very briefly) discuss maybe three (or at most four) interesting features of the research, that’ll be your time up.

 This is the other benefit of having a script in advance: time a couple of your practice run-throughs and you’ll know exactly how long your presentation goes for. If you want to be really clever, you can mark in very rough ‘time stamps’ every two minutes on your script, so you know how much longer your presentation goes. Then you’ll have none of the panic when the chair holds up their ‘2 minutes left’ sign – because as long as you’ve hit your last time stamp, you know you’re fine.

3. Slides are great… as long as they are very simple and you only have a few

Slides are great and a really effective conference tool as long as you use them sensibly. First, you don’t have time to show off your deck of 45 slides. I’d say for a ten-minute presentation, you’re realistically looking at four slides at most, including an opening slide with your name, institution, and the title of your paper or presentation. One slide has your overview or ‘elevator pitch’ of the project, one perhaps has the methodological approach in bullet points, and the last one will have your three or four talking points, again in bullet points. You want your font size to be at least 24 points, so there aren’t going to be many words on these slides at all.

Now, the thing with slides is that I don’t prepare them for the audience’s benefit; I actually prepare them for myself. My slides help me remember what I want to say from my script. My slides act as a brain prompt for what my next point is so I don’t have to refer to my script (and don’t risk the temptation of reading my presentation).

4. Use ‘That’s a great question…’ to your advantage

All questions are not made equal. In fact, many questions asked at the end of conference presentations aren’t even questions at all; you’ve no doubt seen memes or jokes about something being ‘more of a comment than a question’.

But the phrase ‘That’s a great question…’ is your new best friend. First, it acknowledges the person who asked you the question and compliments them. Who doesn’t like to be told they’ve asked a great question? In the best-case scenario, it is a great question and you have a great answer.

But what happens if it’s a hostile question or one you have no idea how to answer? Also fine. You can use the phrasing of ‘That’s a great question’ to deflect, delay, or redirect as appropriate:

• Deflect: ‘That’s a great question. It’s not something I’ve thought about, so I might need to come back to you on that point. I’d love to get your perspective – we can maybe chat after the panel?’

• Delay: ‘That’s a really interesting idea. I haven’t considered that literature yet, but it’s certainly something I’ll follow up on.’

• Redirect: ‘That’s such an important point. We haven’t pursued it in this paper, but what we did find is that….’

5. Bring a pen, paper, and water

I always make sure I have a pen and paper and write down the questions that people are asking me as they ask them. Sometimes the chair will take two or three questions at a time, and it’s easy to forget what the first question was. Having a record of these questions for after the conference can be valuable for reflecting if there are areas of your project that might need extra work or need communicating differently.

Having a pen and paper to hand also means you can note down any pieces of literature that people suggest you follow up on or the names of any question-askers in case you want to get in touch with them later.

Last but not least, bring water. A jug and water glasses will often be provided for presenters, but pack your own anyway. I learned this the hard way after suffering from a very public, prolonged coughing fit during a conference presentation. Let my experience spare you the embarrassment, and bring water with you.