Formal presentations

Standing up in front of other people and sharing your ideas can be a stressful experience, but also the most satisfying intellectually. In formal presentations, you make immediate and public both the strength of your knowledge and any gaps in it. This is risky and rewarding, because it means you are both teaching others and can learn from them (that is, you can do what education is all about). Also, the way you communicate and how you present yourself will influence the response of the audience (and that can make you self-conscious). But by learning more about the best strategies and techniques for formal presentations in academic settings, you can make the most of this valuable learning environment.

There are different ways of formally presenting your work, each with their own rationales and effective methods:

• an individual presentation, in which you present your own work to an audience
• a group presentation, in which you collaborate on the work and/or its presentation
• a project summary, in which you present a brief synopsis of the rationale, method and results of a project or initiative
• a conference paper, in which you present your own work to a group of interested peers