Tips for Oral Presentations/Public Speaking
Here are links to various resources on putting together an oral presentation. Your faculty mentor should be the final word on certain details, but you can put your best foot forward on your first draft by consulting the following tips and exploring these resources.
Most oral presentations use PowerPoint, but other presentation software (Prezi, Keynote) can be used as well. Ask your faculty mentor which software they recommend. Information for SDSU students to download Microsoft Office 365 (with PowerPoint) can be found at the SDSUid IT site. Please note that if you are presenting at the SDSU Student Symposium, you must use PowerPoint.
You are going to want to represent SDSU well, so use high-quality logos! Download the official ones at the SDSU Download Logos site.
The norms/guidelines for oral presentations can vary widely from discipline to discipline, or even from one conference to another. You may wish to ask your faculty mentor for some example presentations.
However, there are some basics for what makes a good presentation, and some websites that offer good advice for putting together your first oral presentation are here:
- Another good overview of the process, from the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium
- Specific details on how to create your poster in Microsoft PowerPoint, from University of San Diego
- A staggering collection of links for additional resources, from University of North Carolina