20 minute talks, with up to 5 minutes for discussion and questions.

Your current research, broadly construed. For a 20 minute talk, you will only be able to talk about a small piece of your work. You may also wish to devote a talk to background material, or to theoretical or experimental material that is closely related to your work. There is always something to talk about, even if your experiment is not working currently.

Computerized projection, overhead projector, and the blackboard are available.  If you use the computerized projection, you may want to make sure before your seminar that your slides appear correctly on the computer in the seminar room.  Make arrangements with your mentor for access to the seminar room.

Most of your audience will not know very much about your field of study, especially before the end of the summer. Avoid jargon, try to emphasize intuitive, qualitative approaches to understanding your work. Assume as little proir knowledge as is possible.

Instructions for listeners: The speakers are relying on you to have interesting questions. These will almost surely help the talk be more understandable to others in the audience. The questions may even help the speaker realize a weakness in their work, or help them in solving a particular problem they face in their work. Do not be afraid to ask hard questions, but please ask them kindly!

Be sure to ask your research advisor about your talk and strategies for presenting your work to this kind of audience. In general, your main challenges will come from the short time limit and the broad audience.  The incorrect response to the first of these constraints is to train yourself to speak very, very fast! Instead, limit the content of your talk to only a few (2 to 4) main topics and eliminate all other material. A 20 minute talk with more than 10-15 substantive overheads or slides is likely to be unsuccessful.

To reach the broad audience, emphasize graphical content over text in presenting the ideas you wish to convey. Constructed and annotated correctly, plots, sketches, pictures, flowcharts, icons, etc. can communicate to a wider range of backgrounds than prose. Consider your own knowledge of the other fields of study represented in the room.

In some cases, quite a few students from a single lab will be participating. Please do not design your talks to be given serially, with each student presenting a part of the longer talk. Each talk should be relatively independent and able to stand alone. There will be some repetition of material, and there will be opportunities to refer to other talks and strengthen your own, but do not design your talk to rely on such references.