Impressions

1. Master analog tools first
2. Presentations are just support
3. Consider the audience’s perspective

Master Analog Tools

Don’t use a PC from the start.

At this point, I keenly realized that my usual presentation material creation isn’t good.

First, you need to write out what you want to convey on sticky notes, group them, and think about the structure.

You need to fully utilize the strength of analog tools—their ability to provide an overview.

Presentations Are Just Support

Presentations aren’t handouts; the main subject is yourself as the presenter, and create separate handouts if necessary!

This was eye-opening and something I agreed with.

It also matched my real experience.

In the first half of university life, classes went online due to COVID-19.

At that time, professors’ screens became PowerPoint presentations.

Most PowerPoints also served as handouts, and you could understand the class content just by reading them.

While I think it was unavoidable then due to the need to create class materials quickly, thinking back now, they weren’t very good classes.

I remembered that in classes I enjoyed as a student and listener, where I remember the content well, the text-only handouts and explanatory PowerPoints were separated.

Match the Audience

You don’t need self-explanations like “I’m nervous today” or “This is my first presentation.”

Of course it depends on the time and situation, but what the audience wants is useful information or new discoveries.

Yet starting with self-talk is self-satisfaction to ease nervousness.

Not limited to presentations, I tend to do this.

Again, while it can be useful sometimes, I need to carefully consider when it’s unnecessary.

Finally

Looking back, many of my international conference presentations and seminar presentations were hard-to-read materials full of text.

For casual situations like “graduate school introduction,” I was able to create layouts like those introduced in this book—just figures and charts without text.

In the future, when proposing new businesses or improvements using data in ML/DS, how will I explain the results obtained from data to supervisors?

I want to apply this to creating presentation materials that help manager-level people, who have many meetings, understand my research content and results.

I borrowed this book from the library, but I’m considering purchasing it.