Presenting.qmd

---
title: Presentations and Networking
author: Neil Ernst
date: Oct 2023
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## Learning Objectives

* Learn the importance of "marketing" yourself.
* Learn about how social networks are important in science.
* Appreciate what makes presentations effective


## Networks and the power of networking

drawn from Marian Petre’s chapter on Networking, in the Unwritten rules of phd book, Mike Hilton’s Twitter notes, Michael Marcozzi, Bogdan Vasilescu on Powerpoint

##
completing a phd takes a village, you are not alone

identifying, creating and nourishing your networks is a skill but powerful strategy

## identify your networks
* supervisors and supervisory committee
* personal support network 
* experts at arm’s length 
* Fellow students! (who become colleagues, profs, researchers, CEOs)

## find experts
authors of particularly relevant papers
people you meet at conferences
people recommended by someone reliable

do some homework: 

* check their website
* ask people who know them
* check with their secretary as to when you can meet them

## cold calls
* in person (at your local department) much easier
* via email 
* at a meeting or conference

## cold call checklist
* did you get their name and title right?
* does your question show that you’ve done some homework?
* does your mentor/supervisor think that your question looks interesting?
* how long would it take a reasonable human being to write a reply to your question? (if it’s more than 10 min, consider rephrasing)
* is your message so long that it scrolls off the page? (if so, shorten it)
* does the message show you in good light, as someone who can spell, write clearly, think and generate interesting questions?
* does the message offer them anything (e.g. access to data) and if so, can you deliver on that promise?

## conference meeting
* have something to say interesting and relevant (a compliment + a question)
* follow up after their presentation
* ask someone to introduce you
* have a business card at hand
* don’t underestimate yourself, remember that great researchers are usually great because: 
* they love ideas and asking questions 
* they were once research students and many of them still remember that!

## do not forget
to include in your networks: 

* mentors (they teach you the unwritten rules and have an interest in your personal, professional and intellectual development)
* secretaries and other support staff (never confuse salary with worth)
* “wonderful” people

## PhDComics on Twitter

<img src="http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd082014s.gif">

## Social media
Ones I use professionally :

Mastodon (88%)

Github (10%) (for social purposes that is)

LinkedIn (2%)

## Dangers
Efficient waster of time

Dodgy ethical practices

Blurs lines of work and home/personal

## Benefits
* Spreads ideas (the agora)
* Amplify papers, advertise talks, share slides, share preprints
* Increases citations
* Inform people of what you are doing
* Engage across hierarchies and geographies
* Look for jobs, advertise new opportunities

## keep up with research 
Follow influential researchers

Keep up with latest ideas

Follow practitioners

Engage with community 

Conferences: an effective backchannel for moaning about jet lag, finding others for dinner, engaging with ideas

## Starting out
As you start out, you are building a reputation. Social media is part of that.

Be professional and recognizable. Possible employers might look at it.

Stay out of argument sinkholes. Some discussions are not productive on Twitter/social media. 

## Building reputation
Own your scientific record

Create and prune your Scholar / Semantic Scholar profile

Create an ORCiD 

Join ACM or IEEE and curate your articles there

## Reputation
Make your articles public - host the preprints on Arxiv

Consider creating a blog or personal website. 

In SE, Github is pretty important. Shows credibility with code, software practice. Often true in ML (paperswithcode.com) and systems.

Publish in good venues

I personally ignore ResearchGate, academia.edu and other remora. But YMMV.

## Building a presence
Ensure people can contact you! 

Make your email visible (and stop with the antispam crap, it doesn’t work)

Forward emails when you move

Say yes to service (but learn to say no judiciously)

Centralize your points of contact (Discord, Slack, Teams, Twitter, email, voice mail)

## Presentations
Two main non paper / non-written interactions:

* Social media
* Presenting/chatting at a conference

Chatting: elevator pitch

## Cognitive limits of the audience
First, who is the audience? What is the venue? 

At a conference, you have 15-25 minutes to present your research

There may be 10-15 talks that day, over 2-3 days

People can only process auditory or visual information in limited chunks

## The Mind Needs Space To Select, Organize & Integrate What’s Important
People understand the presented material when they **pay attention** to the relevant material, **organize** it into a coherent mental structure, and **integrate** it with their prior knowledge.[^bv]

This view of humans as active processors conflicts with a common view of humans as passive processors who seek to add as much information as possible to memory.

[^bv]: h/t B. Vasilescu https://bvasiles.github.io/empirical-methods/spring-2021/slides/21-research-production.pdf 

## Implications
Presentations should use both visual and verbal forms of presentation;

Filling the slides with information will easily overload people's cognitive systems;

The presentations should help learners to select, organize, and integrate presented information.

## Tips
Have a slide title that explains the main idea 

* “We did X, Y, Z” rather than “Contributions”

Keep the narrative obvious (see Schimel and writing tips)

Minimize text in favour of narration 

* may be challenging for EFL speakers!

## Tips

**Rehearse**! I do at least 2-3 in front of a mirror, and for big presentations at least 1 in front of “friends”

**Stay on time**. Remember you will have 2-3 other presenters as well. 

Watch other people. What makes them effective? 

Remember: you are trying to get people **excited** about your work. If you are a low-energy person like me, you should feel like you are exaggerating your personality (super uncomfortable!)

Plenty of tutorials and books, such as [Neal Ford’s Presentation Patterns](https://presentationpatterns.com)

## Mundane tips
Number slides

End with a bang

Tenured faculty have poor eyesight

Decide whether you want visual appeal, or slides with tons of content.

## Exercise
In groups of 4, find an online presentation and critique its style

- could be someone in the group
- could be mine
- also see Slideshare, SpeakerDeck

Share the URL, and one improvement your group found.

## Activity

* Create a Twitter/Mastodon profile, OrcID, and Scholar profile (in class)

## Readings (before class)

## Optional Readings
- [Presentation Patterns](https://presentationpatterns.com)
- [Marketing for Scientists](http://marketingforscientists.com/book/)