83 Introduction: Speech!

So you have finished your thesis. Accept our warmest congratulations! You have spent a year fixating on your contribution, contorting your thoughts around the significance of your findings. It is only right that you share your work with others. If you are enrolled in a formal research-based program such as Honours, maybe an undergraduate conference is a requirement of your program, or maybe you are required to share your work with your cohort (class presentation) or to your department.

Some of you might be relishing the opportunity to showcase your brilliance or to get feedback on your work. We applaud you. For others, the thought of sharing your work with others is outright frightening. We are here to assure you that it is doable with carefully planning, practice and mindfulness (see Chapter 4).

The truth is there is nothing that we can say to change your initial feeling about presenting your work. However, we hope to offer strategies to help you to approach presenting your work (orally or via posters) in a systematic and effective way that takes some of the pressure off you. We begin with a discussion of the application process to conferences, before providing tips for structuring your presentation. In particular, we share ideas on how you can shrink all your research into a concise 10 minute oral presentation. Next, we offer guidelines for poster design and presentations before finishing off with tips on how to deal with the question period. We encourage you not to be daunted by the task of sharing your work. For what it is worth, remember that “conferring” your findings with others will integrate you in a community of like-minded scholars and provide validation for your research.