Masters Colloquium Talks

Monday at 16:00pm in HL 414

Scheduling and contact: colloquia@strw.leidenuniv.nl

Scheduling and Practice Organisation:Bas Nefs

Staff member: Elena Rossi

A passing grade is required for graduation in the Masters program and counts
as 1 ECTS of your Major Research Project.

Scheduling

Schedule your colloquium talk at least three months ahead of time, and also at least one month before your graduation. If you do not give a good enough colloquium talk, you will be required to reschedule it and give a revised talk.

You must give one practise talk before your scheduled colloquium talk. If you do not give a practise talk, you cannot give the colloquium talk.

Giving a practice talk beforehand

You give your prepared colloquium talk to a group of other students. They will give feedback on your talk, and it is a good check for the length of your talk and your presentation skills. This must be scheduled at least two weeks before your colloquium talk and must be arranged by you and the Student Organiser.

Subject of your talk

Your talk will be on your research topic and the work carried out as part of your Major Master’s research here at the Observatory. There is no excuse for not giving a talk in time. If there are no results from your research, then you should give a review talk on the topic of your research.

The mark is on your presentation skills, not the scientific success of your research project.

Discuss the date and detailed contents of your talk with your research project supervisor, WELL BEFORE the intended day.

Presenting your talk

The talk should be about 40-45 minutes, which is a typical colloquium presentation to give at another research department. Talks of less than 30 minutes length will strongly negatively impact your grade.

Break your talk down (roughly) into:

15 minutes introduction to the field of research. You should aim for a general audience - you can assume the audience knows basic physics, but they may not know about the flux units you use, or what the current research questions are. They won’t know what acronyms stand for (ULIRGs, EGPs, SPH code, etc...)

15 minutes on your work in this field of research and how you hope to answer the research question.

10 to 15 minutes for results and future prospects.

You may use your own laptop or arrange to borrow one from the Computer Group in advance.

Scoring

The mark is on your presentation skills, not the scientific success of your research project. What we look for when we watch your presentation:

A good introduction - Take your time for a good introduction. Next to telling what you are going to do, also tell why the research is important, how does your research fit into current trends. Try to make the audience enthusiastic enough to be interested for the rest of the talk.

Oral presentation

Clear pronunciation

Nervousness (everyone is nervous at the start)

Speak clearly so that people at the back of the room can hear you. Avoid talking with a monotone voice. Look at your audience, not at the screen

Visual presentation Be sure all figures are clear and readable from the back of the room, and explain what is on the axes of your plots. Try to use contrasting colours. Use a clear structure in your presentation: an introduction, a middle part, a summary, a conclusion and future work.

Background

It is important that every time you show observations that you explain their origin, or how they were taken. This is especially important when you give a more theoretical talk - your audience will be grateful!

If your work includes a lot of simulations, it is important to stress the relation between the simulations and reality (observations).

Questions afterwards - A very important part of the talk are the questions afterwards. The questions are usually not very hard to answer, but they might be stated in a different way than you expect (there will be a lot of people in the audience who see your research for the first time, and will look upon it from their own field of work). Also, expect very general questions.