Presenting Powerpoint

Presentation is everything in today's society.  So naturally, the education system tries to groom the presentation skills of young students from when they are 7 years old through college and beyond. Today, this morning actually, I gave two final project presentations for my graduate level courses (Particle Design and Computational Chemistry) and now that I am finished with the craziness of preparing for said presentations, I thought about how my presentation skills have changed over the years.  More specifically, I realized how different my presentation was from the undergraduates in each course and different from the grad students who are almost finished with their degrees.  So, I am going to attempt to outline the evolution of presentations, with great emphasis on Powerpoint, because only God knows how we would communicate anything without Microsoft's crown jewel application.

Stage One - Your first presentation.

Like taking your first steps or saying your first words, the first oral presentation you give in school is a huge deal.  It usually occurs somewhere in grades 1-3 depending what you consider a presentation.  The earliest "presentation" I remember was a diorama of a Walrus I made from modeling clay.  We had to present our diorama and to tell a little bit about the animal.  Very basic, but I remember my mom writing a few facts on a note-card for me so I wouldn't forget.  Basic but terrifying.  Overall, nothing too elaborate thus it needs no further explanation.

Stage Two - The First Powerpoint.

Not long after teachers get tired of trying to read kids handwriting for assignments they begin to have you type out some assignments in a Word document.  And like the curious kids we all are, we click on the magical orange icon next to word, Powerpoint.  The ability to choose colors, fonts, boxes, shapes, and possibly animations was mesmerizing.  So, every kid found their favorite animal, sport, or food and made a quick slide show.  The backgrounds were usually brightly colored gradients that outlined multiple, non-uniform boxes of crazy looking text.  And the clip-art, what would we do without the little stick figures and smiley faces Microsoft kindly gave everyone.  When I was first introduced to powerpoint, it changed my life and those few friends of mine who spent hours playing Duke Nukem and typing our Christmas lists out for our parents.  Additionally, there should probably be a standard slide for these presentations that reads; "Caution!  Slide Show contains bright colors and irregular shapes.  If you are prone to seizures or are pregnant, please do not watch this presentation!"

Stage Three - The Rules

Sometime in that weird pre-teen stage of school, everyone has at least one teacher who wants you to give a presentation over something quite trivial.  However, the teacher is a quirky control freak and gives you a two-page outline of what the presentation needs to have (usually the outline has a word count that is higher than what is expected for the presentation you have to give).  Here is an example list of rules or how I remember some of the rules.

-Specific Length of Slides (~2 slides longer than you have information for)

-Choice of three fonts (Times New Roman, Times New Roman, or Times New Roman)

-Font Color must be darker than background color

-Background color must be a neutral color (aka white)

-No more than 2 animations per slide

-No more than 2 sentences and 1 picture per slide (what were we suppose to put on the slide)

So it looked like this...

And you never know the ending to any report because of the limitations.  Imagine if Romeo and Juliet ended when they fall in love...how boring?!?

Stage Four - Creative Liability

High school was a time to express yourself.  Thus the universal thing to do was go all out for every presentation.  Posters, visual aids, pictures to pass around, costumes, skits, and powerpoint slide shows with every animation known to man. They were like watching a go-kart race of words and pictures.  And the more advanced the presentation, the better the grade and popularity regardless of content...because if you were good at Powerpoint, you were cool (lol).

Stage Five- Utilizing the Themes (aka Laziness)

College.  The most vivid presentations in my mind are from college.  And they all look the same.  Dress shirt and tie and a themed powerpoint.  Yes, themed.  The lazy way to add a different font, color, and design to an entire presentation.  These were more about content and staying within the time limit for the presentation, which again is always 5-10 minutes less than what you need to adequately meet all the requirements for the project.  Also, themed slide shows allow for groups to make different parts of a presentation and bring them together in one seemless style.  For example...

Stage Six - Regression

Today I realized that grad school will begin my regression stage.  The regression stage is where your presentations become more and more minimalistic.  I believe that as the content becomes more complicated, the slides become more simple.  I have noticed that every grad student and post-doc student presentation looks like they forgot how to use powerpoint and just copied and pasted his presentation from the academic publication they just finished.  And I feel that stage coming because last night as we put the finishing touches on a group presentation, my few sldies were completely redesigned by the 3 undergrads in the project.  Not necessarily a bad thing, I just felt my time was best spent on anything else. Like, golf or watching "The League."

Stage Seven - The Never Ending Presentation

The seventh and finals stage is that of the tenure professor.  These presentations take the minimalistic approach from stage six and create monster slide shows.  Most lectures are 20-30 slides, but once you get past a time frame for teaching a certain subject, you can create slide shows of 50, 75, 100 slides.  The biggest slide show I have ever seen was in high school during an AP Biology field trip.  The speaker spoke about new medical advances in a slide show of over 300 slides.  Wow!  And as if we needed a constant reminder that we were an eternity from finishing the lecture, the slide numbers are placed in the right hand corner.

All and all, every academic will go through these stages in one form or another.  So don't resist and just try to remember what it was like to sit in the audience for all the other boring presentations while you finish your presentations.