Most common thesis defense mistakes
It is finally the most important day you have been waiting for: the day you defend your thesis! You generally have 30-45 minutes to present to the committee, and this moment has been filled with expectations.
In my career as an advisor and committee member, I have been in countless thesis defenses and I have observed students making several mistakes. Mistakes that, with little preparation and extra work, could be easily avoided.
For this reason, in this video I summarize the most common thesis presentation mistakes, and provide suggestions on how to avoid them.
Trying to present everything
You have worked so hard for years to finish your degree. You have gone through so many attempts and failures, and explored different options. So you have produced countless results and insights. How can you not tell the committee all that you have accomplished and worked so hard for?
However, the unavoidable truth is that you have no time to present everything. Trying to rush through all your results will result in a presentation impossible to understand, you will be more likely to struggle and make mistakes, and overall, you will give a poor impression to the committee.
I have two main suggestions here.
First, look at how much time you have available and determine how many slides you should have. I had students come to me with more than 60 slides for a 30 minute presentations. This was clearly a recipe for disaster. To set a hard limit on the maximum number of slides you should have between half to 2/3rd of the number of minutes available. So, for example, for a 30 minute presentation you should have between 15-20 slides, maximum.
Second, you should balance breadth with depth. This is, in my opinion, the key to impress the committee while staying in the allotted time. First, you want to give a high level overview of all your work. With the understanding that this will necessarily be at a very high level. As an example, you can say I worked on problems A, B, and C. These resulted in more than 10 publications, including these Transactions, and these A* conferences.
Once you have impressed with breadth, dig deeper into one topic, or maximum two if you have more than 30 minutes. You can say “Given the lack of time, I am not able to present all these results, but I will focus on A in this presentation”. Then, for that specific result, provide a detailed presentation that includes motivation, related work, system model, methodologies, comparison approaches, results, etc.
Poor slides design
Let’s now move to the next mistake: poor slides design.
Making good slides is an art. It is a delicate balance. Very often we see slides that are too dense or too empty, redundant, or uneven. Other times slides are full of impossible to understand equations, symbols, or diagrams.
Slides should complement your talk, should support what you are saying, should trigger the audience intuition and provide visual input that can ease the understanding of some concepts, and should provide some details you have no time to discuss.
My suggestion is look at good presenters, get inspired, and seek feedback. You will eventually master this skill.
Not enough preparation
The next mistake is something I often repeat in my videos and to my own students: practice is key to success.
Do not come to your advisor the day before the presentation asking for feedback on the slides. You may just have two outcomes: 1) the advisor has no time and only gives very high level feedback, or 2) the advisor provides a long detailed feedback that you have no time to address properly.
The suggestion here is to first, work on your slides well in advance. Practice the presentation 1 or 2 times by yourself, see if you feel it is right. Often it is not, and you can fix it before meeting the advisor. Then, seek feedback from your advisor and colleagues and address their comments. Finally, practice the presentation in front of your friends, your family, and alone.
Practice, until you are comfortable and confident presenting the content.
Reading the slides
Preparation will also help you with another common problem: students presenting reading the slides.
Have you seen this before? Let me know in the comments.
I think we all agree that there is no less engaging presentation than a presentation where someone is just looking at the slides, and reading all the text.
It shows that clearly, you have not practiced enough and you do not know the content to present it.
Often this mistakes comes with slides filled with too much text, as we already mentioned.
The key to avoid this mistake is practice, and you can adjust the slides and you become more confident presenting the content.
Methods and results are not fresh in your mind
Let’s now talk about the next mistake. When you present your thesis, you often present methodologies and results that you have worked on months, if not even years ago. It is quite natural that some details of those results are not fresh in your mind anymore.
The committee however expects you to know what you are presenting, and may be asking some questions about a trend in the results, or a specific choice in your methodology, that you no longer remember.
Clearly, the answer “I do not recall” it’s quite embarrassing. So, make sure you read your papers, look at your design choice, at the results, and make sure everything you present is fresh. This should apply to the main slides, but also to the support slides that you keep hidden.
Logistics
Finally, I want to mention something that is really often overlooked. It is not your presentation, it is not your scientific results. It’s not preparing for the logistics of your exam.
Will you use your laptop? Will the laptop connect to the projector? Do you need a presenter? Do you have video in your presentation, and is the audio clear in the room? Is your presentation remote? If so, can everyone hear you? Can you hear them? Can they see the slides?
These are just some of the logistics you need to prepare for, and you cannot improvise by showing up 2 minutes before the start of the presentation. The time you loose taking care of these, is time you could have used presenting your thesis.
The solutions is simple, show up early, even the day before. Test all the systems, connections, audio and video. And make sure it all works, and seek for help if it does not.
I hope this video was useful. Please comment below if you have any other suggestions or have experienced other issues.
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