Presenting and attending academic conferences can be both one of the most exciting, but also one of the most anxiety-producing part of an early-career academic’s professional life. This presentation will focus on some key questions to ask yourself and some cautionary notes as you prepare, write your paper, design slides (or don’t), and actually present your original research. Your presenter brings decades of experience, innumerable mistakes and assorted stuff-ups, and horror stories that are liable to curl your hair of conferences-gone-wrong, presentation debacles, and other nightmares to learn from, so your experiences will be much better.

Slides available at Slideshare here.

The presentation went over really well. Some of the feedback included:

Exceptional presentation. I learnt more in his session than in other presentations on presentations, and from my own learning. The content was so compressed, it covered not only the information I had in mind, but factors that hadn’t occurred to me. Where has that guy been all my life?

One commenter even had an additional suggestion that came from studying how I was presenting (which was part of my advice):

Very engaging – receiving presentation tips from someone who himself gave such a great presentation is always a good thing! …

Greg, I noticed you rephrased the questions people asked during question time in case the audience hadn’t heard them, which was great. May I humbly suggest you include this technique on the “how to respond to questions” section of your seminar as something presenters should consider doing, subject to room layout audience numbers etc.