Education

Student Presentation Guidelines

The faculty preceptor should meet with the students before their presentation to help plan the format, review the presentation and advise students. It is the student’s responsibility to arrange this, greater than a week in advance. If desired, Drs. Weiss, Morrissey or Epstein are also available to meet with students to review their presentation, after they have met with the primary preceptor who chose the papers. This should also be arranged more than a week in advance.
Student should prepare a power point presentation of about 20 slides or less. This should review background including other relevant literature, rationale for the study, major questions being addressed, important methods, important figures from the paper and major conclusions of the work. This presentation should take 30 minutes or less. The student or faculty may solicit help from the audience to review the figures. It may not be necessary to review all of the figures, only the important ones. In the interest of time, less important figures can be summarized.
Student should lead a discussion of the paper. For the remaining time after the formal presentation, the student should lead an approximately 15 minute discussion about the paper. Most importantly, this discussion should be fun, interesting and creative. Topics/questions that can be covered include: potential flaws of the study and how to correct them, broad relevance of the work to other fields of biology, potential long-term follow-up studies (what would you do next?), implications for medicine, ethical considerations.
Total time for each paper should be limited to about 45 minutes. The student should plan the power point presentation and guide the subsequent discussion accordingly.
On the day of your presentation: Arrive 10-15 minutes early and make sure that the file is loaded on the computer and ready to go!
Course directors will meet with the students briefly after class to critique the presentation and offer useful suggestions.

Education