Pilot Project Research Presentation Lightning Talks:

How to develop your PPRP for SERRS 2021

The Southeast Regional Research Symposium will host pilot project presentations as lightning talks during our 2021 online gathering. Lighting talks permit focused information to be shared by more contributors while reducing online viewing fatigue. More for less. Basic elements should include an introduction (with a strong hook for your storyline/project rationale), a birds-eye view of your approach, a summary of most important results, and conclusions/implications/homework).

Indeed, lightning is a different beast. In a longer talk, you teach a bit (background to the field & introduction to the problem at hand), show your stuff (your work), and “advertise it” to your community (show how your work contributes to the field; how you left it better; how it’s adaptable). In a lightning talk, you want to get a single message across. And you want it to stand out, so you cannot afford to be too complex – you just won’t have the time. Here are some helpful dos and don’ts:

Do: Prepare five slides (no more, no less – that’s the challenge). Make sure your slides are relatively sparse. An image or two per slide; no complex graphs. If you need words, write them big and few. Consider one slide = one thought.  Less is more. Your slides should support your storyline as the presenter, i.e., your slides do not provide the presentation – you do.

Do: Introduce yourself clearly, briefly, at the beginning (name, affiliation, position, what you do). Provide a statement of the problem and its importance, a summary of key elements of your research, and your key findings and implications.

Do: Provide acknowledgments at the beginning of your presentation, possibly incorporating into your title slide. Although it may be common in a typical 20-minute talk to place it at the end, in a lightning talk you want your last slide to be something else, i.e., something meaningful and memorable to support your singular message.

Do: Speak at your normal pace. Reduce the number of words and/or constructs if you have to rush to get done in 5 minutes. Make sure your microphone is placed a reasonable distance from your face so that your voice quality is clear and easily understood.

Do: Develop a strong closing slide. Provide a clear meaningful summary and take-home message.

Don’t: Use discipline-specific jargon. Reduce cumbersome or unrelatable content for consumption by non-specialist audiences. Get rid of number jargon, e.g., “47.65 percent of responses” can be rephrased as “about half of the responses;” “32 million Americans” becomes “1 in 10 Americans;” “8 centimeters in diameter” might be better understood as “about the size of a baseball.”

Don’t: go over the allotted 5-minute time. This keeps it fair within the same template for all presenters and it fosters greater accessibility to each of the project presentations because they are short, concise, yet informative to your colleagues. If folks want more information or details they will be able to contact you directly.

Do: Make your research personal. Consider including a short anecdote about a pivotal success or challenge to connect with the audience. Consider brief reflections on what you learned through this experience.

Do: Simplify complex concepts using analogies and metaphors. Emphasize important points using evidence such as simple, meaningful data points, and/or statistics. In a typical scientific presentation, you’re expected to show data slides through figures, tables, graphs, and equations. There will not enough time to go through your data in your lightning talk as you might normally do in a typical 20- or 40-minute presentation. Discussion of complex analyses is not going to happen in a lightning talk. Instead, use photos, graphics, and minimal text. Consider the use of visualizations. Design your graphics so that their interpretation can be self-evident without much explanation.

Don’t: Use PowerPoint animations and transitions (consider static slides). Give up bells and whistles for concise content, clarity of thought, and no distractions.

Do: Practice, perhaps more than you typically might for a typical 20-minute presentation, prior to recording. Limit the amount of information from each of your 5 slides and pace your story reasonably across your slides. Since you will record your lightning talk, you can take your time to really nail concise content for each slide, while supporting the flow and delivery of your singular message throughout the talk.

Do: Add narration to each of your 5 slides in your lightning talk and export the narrated presentation to an mp4 file. Here’s an easy YouTube link from our friends at the University of Central Florida that exemplifies how to do this.

Do: Upload your PPRP mp4 file, along with other requested information on the SERRS website by DATE CERTAIN. Register for the conference.

Thank you for your important contribution to the online 2021 SERRS.

Ride the lightning! See you there.