Introductory Presentations

You will give a talk (7 min) that introduces yourself, your work, and your field to your classmates and instructors. Your presentation should be legible and informative to everyone in the audience. Your job is to teach your audience about you and your field, and to help make your field legible to your peers and instructors.

Logistics

Weight	8 points (individual)
Length	10 minutes total: 7min presentation + 3min questions, strictly enforced
Presentation days	Thursday, September 24 and Tuesday, September 29
Presentation slots	Will be posted Thursday, September 17 HERE
Slides	Upload (Google) slides here, due by the start of class on the first day of presentations (Thursday, September 24), regardless of which day you present

Your talk will:

1. Introduce yourself to your peers and instructors (in longer form than on the first day)
2. Help your peers and instructors understand how your field or discipline works
3. Help your peers and instructors understand where your work and interests fit into your field in general, and in relation to their own fields

You will:

1. Understand similarities and differences in the underlying approaches and philosophies of different fields
2. Practice describing your work across disciplinary backgrounds
3. Identify complementary interests and backgrounds among your classmates

Topics to cover

Aim for roughly a 1:1:1 balance between you, your work and interests, and your field.

You do not need to thoroughly cover every prompt below. Feel free to pick the ones that make your situation clear to someone outside it.

1. You

You probably answered some of this on the introduction form. Feel free to pull from your answers for those!

• Your work: what you do in your degree program, your research area, or something analogous
• Other disciplinary backgrounds: formal or informal, e.g. masters in creative writing + spent 3 years in marketing
• Skills and knowledge you already have: tools you have used, things you have built
• What you want out of the course/project: Skills or concepts you want to learn, skills or concepts you want to try applying, tools you would like to try using. If you have an interest not related to your work that you’d like to explore in this class, that’s great! Make sure to talk about it.

2. Your work and interests

• Your topic(s): your research topic or topics, something you like doing in your field, or something you would like to try doing differently
• Where you sit relative to others in your field e.g. “in my field some people are interested in X, others are more interested in Y. I am more interested in X than Y but the way I approach research problems is actually grounded in Z.”
• Your methodologies: which methods you actually use, and where they came from. e.g. “we can think of my field as having three main clusters of methods and I use two of them, where one of them is actually sort of rooted in this other adjacent field”

3. Your field

Describe the wider context your work sits in. You may find it helpful to use concrete anchors to help describe your field:

• Publication venues, if you are a researcher– otherwise, the job titles or skillsets that are relevant to people in your field
• Disciplinary backgrounds that people in your field typically have, and how yours compares e.g. “most people in my degree program or field have a degree in X, but I have one in Y.”
• Typical methodology for your field. Qualitative, quantitative, or some mix, and what counts as evidence.
• Optional, include if it helps: field history, or a summary of a seminal work or development in your specific area of expertise.

Assume your audience does not know how long a project typically takes or costs, what kinds of outputs and achievements are considered valuable (e.g. conference papers, journals, recognition of achievement or competency by a central organization, practical experience), how many people usually work on a project, what a result has to look like before someone takes it seriously, etc. These are often field-specific norms that can be helpful to surface!

Tips

• Organize your slides in any way that works for you and helps presentation clarity and coherence. For example, you might talk about yourself and your interests first and then your field more generally, or you might instead interleave your own expertise and interests with comments about your field as you go. Either works just fine!
• If you have the chance, practice describing your work with your project group, or with anyone outside your field, and gather initial feedback before you present. This can be informal! e.g. a quick “is this true in your field too??”
• Define or drop field-specific jargon!
• Please pay attention to timing! You will be graded based on the presentation that you are able to give in the allotted time, and on the presentation that has been uploaded by the deadline (start of class on the 24th).