Latinxs & the Environment Conference Oral Presentation Guidelines

Getting started

• You should plan on a 12-minute presentation, with 3 minutes for questions afterwards.
• Everyone must submit the presetation by email as a ppt file by Friday, October 13th at 11:59 pm to apro@ucr.edu.

Tips for your slides

• Everyone must use PowerPoint slide decks for their presentation. Please do not use Keynote or any other software and do not submit any pdfs
• Please practice your talk so that your presentation does not go over 12 minutes and you can deliver it without reading off a script.
• For a 12-minute presentation, you can choose to have between 1-10 slides, not counting the title, acknowledgements/questions slides.
• Please read your first slide with your name, program, campus affiliation, your mentor, and the title of your presentation at the beginning.
• Minimize the amount of text on your slides; images, graphics, and cartoons are preferable.
• Make sure the text on the slides is large enough for an audience sitting up to 20 feet away can still read your slides.
• Spell check your presentation.
• Remember that you are speaking to a diverse audience, so explain why your research is relevant and explain any technical terms for the audience.
• Please email your ppt slide presentation (not a pdf) to apro@ucr.edu by Friday, October 13th at 11:59 pm. 
• Be sure your file name is formatted following the template here: Lastname_firstname_talk_uploaddate.ppt.

• For example: McGeehan_Laura_talk_Aug11.ppt

Getting ready and presenting your talk

• Practice your talk with your faculty mentor, lab and or friends.
• Practice enough so that you can present without reading from your slides or following a script and stay within the 12-minute limit.
• Dress appropriately (BUSINESS STYLE) for the Symposium

Make sure you can:

• Explain your project with confidence
• Understand your research question
• Understand why you used particular statistics or analytical methods
• Contextualize your project (the big picture) for your audience
• Explain the “What and the How”
• Explain the “Why”
• Explain the “What Next”
• Explain your statistics

Common mistakes to avoid:

• Failing to practice your presentation
• Forgetting to label your figures
• Using an incomplete title
• Forgetting to reference things that are not yours
• Failing to spell check your content
• Using inappropriate images

General questions people may ask you after you presentation

• How did you get interested in this project?
• Were the findings what you expected?
• What was the most difficult aspect of this project?
• Why did you use this statistic in analyzing your data?
• What have other people in your field found?
• What is your hypothesis?
• What did you do?
• How did you do it?
• What’s the next step?
• What can you do with this research? How is it applicable?

Edited Sep 23, 2023