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So I have a question for you, Asami.
You are really good at presentations and your slides are beautiful.
So what is your こだわり in your presentation slides?
Yeah, it's one of those things that nobody actually teaches you how to do
this well, I think. And it's kind of expected that you pick up along the way,
you know, like as you go through grad school. And I feel like so many people could use a crush
course on how to put together a proper good-looking presentation, because it doesn't take a lot.
And I'm not going to claim that I am the best of all, but I do like to think that I put some
thoughts into my presentation, especially if I'm giving a PowerPoint presentation, how the visual
side of things look. I think, first and foremost, I try to organize my slides and talk in a way
that is easier for everyone to navigate. And that, I guess, depends on who you're talking to as well,
right? Like, are you talking to your group members? Are you talking in a conference? Are you talking
to people who are scientific, but not necessarily your expertise? Or are you talking to a completely
lay person? That all kind of depends. So that's something I try to think about,
you know, does my slide visually make sense? And one of the things that is hard in PowerPoint
presentation is remembering how to sync your talk with the slides. I frequently do this thing where
like, in my head, I know what to talk about. So I start talking, and then the slides pop up and like,
oh, I just talked about this. Oops, you know, and that's super awkward. So I try to avoid that as
much as possible. Have you ever experienced like a 頭が真っ白になる experience? How would you call that in English?
Like when you're blanking out, or I mean, in a less polite way, people say brain fart.
But that's exactly how it feels sometimes. Usually, that doesn't happen during the talk. For me, it's
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more Q&A for me. That happens. Like, there are certain kind of questions that I'm expecting,
and I'm anticipating. But once in a while, somebody asks a random question that has nothing to do.
Yeah, nothing to do with your talk. And it's like, you know, but you need to be polite. So
yeah, you try to answer to the best of your abilities. But at least for the part that I'm
talking about, I try to use my slide as a guide to like, remember what I was talking about. Right?
So you generally know what to talk about. But in terms of the order you talk about or how much you
talk about something, that's sort of easy to forget, I think. So I always try to use the slides
that not only make sense for the audience, but also helps me remember what to talk about.
And in that case, sometimes animation is helpful, right? Like it helps you to transition to the
next topic or something. But I feel like overusing animation makes it really hard to follow. Like
when you lose that organization, if you know all of your animation to T, then it's okay.
But if you sort of put together last minute, which is like every single talk anyway,
then you forget where you put the animations. And then it messes your flow. And that doesn't help
you. So I also try to avoid using animation. And another reason why I avoid animation is
in the worst case scenario, where somehow your PowerPoint slide doesn't work,
you should always have a PDF backup. And in PDF, you can't use animation.
So that's another reason why very rarely it makes sense to do animation.
There's only a few places in my presentation that makes sense to use animation most of the time.
And most of the time, it's not even necessary. So I try to avoid that.
And if I'm talking, if it's a scientific talk, you almost always have some kind of figures.
I always try to remember that not everyone is used to seeing the kind of plots that I'm plotting.
Which if it's just like a line graph or histogram, it's pretty obvious what you're talking about.
But in my field, I use 2D contour plots and things like that. For someone who's not used
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to seeing my plot every day, it can be hard to orient themselves. So if it's a first figure
of this talk, I always try to say, hey, x-axis is this and y-axis is this. And here's what we're
trying to look for. And I try not to just go straight into, like, look at this part of the
graph. That's another thing I try. What is your biggest mistake that you've made? If you have
any. There are so many. I think, well, in terms of mistakes, the less scientific ones,
like the more accidental ones, are like not realizing that my laser pointer wasn't working
until like halfway through my talk, or not realizing that I was standing in front of
the projector. So like my shadow was on the projector the whole time or something.
But there are definitely times where I stumbled on super simple words or somebody asked me,
I don't like people asking me questions halfway through the talk.
Oh, you don't like it?
I mean, if it's like, oh, what did you just say? Or something simple like that, that's all right.
But like, you know, I have a talk planned. And like, I have my 15 minutes, half an hour,
whatever, you know, the slot. I mean, if it's a group meeting, it's a different story. My group
meeting is very sort of conversational. So, you know, anyone can interrupt at all times. But like,
if it's a formal talk, I hate it when people interrupt me, because I kind of lose my flow.
And that's when I sort of like get flustered. And I will, yeah, just like do or say stupid things.
But I think I'm most afraid of Q&A really, for the most part. And that's where I get thrown off
the most. Or I think that's the part that gets thrown off. It's the riskiest part usually of
the talk for me. Because yeah, on your talk, you know what to talk about. And it's the Q&A that
to the audience that you don't usually interact with. That's when it's really kind of hard that
some people have a completely different questions on stuff that you sort of take it for granted.
Yeah, sometimes, yeah, like I've done definitely sometimes where it's like
really basic concepts, but we use it so often that I didn't know the exact definition of it
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or something. And somebody asked me, and I was like, ah, like, I'm not fully under like,
I'm not fully explaining this. But I know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, so there's definitely sometimes like that.
My, yeah, my former colleague, he made a really funny mistakes. During his presentation,
he was giving a talk. And then because he was standing very far away from the microphone,
no one could hear what he was saying. And then his collaborators sitting in front of the lines,
they were like, waving their hands and then to try to signal Oh, we can't really hear you. But
he did presentations until the end of the, until the end. And then, yeah, so that was,
yeah, something I heard. And also, I think one of the biggest mistakes I made is that
it's, you know, you have to know the audience, what kind of audience it is that you're gonna
That's super important. Yeah.
But I knew it, because everyone says so. But then, um, yeah, I gave a talk.
I made it something really too easy to like a specialist. And that was, yeah, during the
presentation, I kind of felt that, oh, this is not the, you know, audience I imagined.
I made a mistake. Yeah, I kind of, yeah, since that, like the, from the atmosphere of the
That's like, so that's somehow so much more awkward than the other way around, where you
prepared a too difficult of a talk for somebody that is super, like, new to the topic. Yeah,
that's like, really awkward. Like, oh, like, I'm giving you a very dumb talk.
Yeah. Well, I don't know, I guess I guess it happens, you know, it's inevitable. I think,
thankfully, one of the most embarrassing things that happened to me are all kind of relatively
technical things, you know, like the laser pointer, like your colleagues, like microphone.
But, or like, when you thought that you have a video or like figure ready, and that somehow
just corrupts. And this has happened to me in like, group meeting, but not in like,
conference and stuff. So thank God for that. But it is, it is sometimes like, you know,
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technical difficulties, just kind of inevitable. But I feel like it's becoming less and less
acceptable to have these kind of issues. Because it's like, well, you live in 21st century,
you should know how to deal with this. Yeah. But yeah, that's, that's, that's all interesting. I
think presentation is just kind of nerve wracking in general. Nobody loves presentation, I think.
But yeah, it just all I can say is just practice and prepared. Yeah, like know the questions,
know, know what parts you're going to talk about and what you're going to say for your Q&A session.
And do not use Comic Sans as a font.
I swear, like, you know, in my five years of grad school, I have seen a handful of Comic Sans
presentation from, from like, established professionals to like, I don't know what
to think about your choices anymore. But hey, you know, people do that.
That's it.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us at Agodescience on
Twitter. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
