Presentations
You might want to read this article from Physics Today.
Guidelines for 12-Minute Talks (10 + 2)
You must give a short presentation on one of the experiments you have completed so far in this course. This presentation will be in the style of a short American Physical Society conference presentation. You should prepare your talk as if you were presenting your research results for the first time to your colleagues.
Talks should be 10 minutes long, with 2 minutes for questions at the end.
You must prepare your talk using PowerPoint and and have it ready to use the computer in the lecture room. As a general rule, you should plan on speaking for about one minute per PowerPoint slide, so you will need about ten slides. You must have your talk on a USB drive ready to download to the computer before the beginning of class on the day you give your talk. It is not advisable to depend on the network. Tommy can give you access to this co
Things to Keep in Mind
First and foremost, your talks should focus on the physics of your experiment.
In the time allotted, you need to describe what question you are probing, why
it is important, how you made the measurement, how you extracted quantitative
information from the experiment and, of course, the result. Your presentation
should also include what assumptions you made and a brief discussion of what
your result means.
Note, there will be precious little time so you will not be able to go into details! There will not be enough time to talk about all aspects of the experiment. You will have to select the most essential features to summarize and skip the rest. You should spend approximately 1 min per slide, about 10 but no more than 12 slides. The fewer the better!
The entire purpose of the talk is to showoff your work and to leave the audience with the impression that you did an interesting experiment and did it correctly. Thus, you need to provide quantitative information and connect your experiment to the rest of the physics world and beyond, whenever possible. As you know from experience it is always easier to follow talks with interesting graphics. So, you should use cartoons, pictures, plots, etc. instead of words! Your presentations should be final results not progress reports!
Grading
The attached score sheet will be used to assess your presentation. Your grade
budget is as follows:
1. TA’s score 25%,
2. Average score of your classmates, 25%.
3. My score, 50%.
Please note, you must attend and judge each talk or
receive a score of 0 for the talk!
A couple of examples: