Now that we have done most of the hard work: numerous experiments, survey, coding, refactoring, pipelining, analysis, visualization, charts, numbers, written documents and so on, we are going to give a final presentation. “That’s easy,” one may think, “Just paste my results into PowerPoint slides and click through it.”
Having seen quite a lot of presentations at conferences, group meetings, and tech demos, and having given many presentations myself in different scenarios, one thing I can say for sure about presentations is that “It is not easy” at all. It is as demanding as most of the hard work we have done, and requires similar learning and practice as coding, analysis, and writing. In this post, I will summarize what I learned from my mentors, teachers, peers, as well as my own mistakes about presentations.