Guide for a 12-Minute Research Presentation

Note: Document prepared for MPE summer program (undergraduates)

Timing

• 10–12 minutes max → aim for ~10 slides.
• Rule of thumb: 1–2 minutes per slide. If you have 40 slides, you’re doing way too much.

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Suggested Slide Flow

1. Title Slide

• Project title + your name + your institution.
• I personally like to start with an image even here, but that is weird.
• Tip: remember this is a useful slide. Spend ~0.5-1 min here saying who you are, and mention the topic of your presentation. Do not jump immediately to the next slide.

2. Intro

• What’s the big idea? Why should we care?
• State your research questions.
• A picture or graph is a great hook—way better than a wall of text.

3. Literature & Theory

• Yes, you’ve read 1,000 papers. No, we don’t need all of them.
• Just tell us the key ones so we understand where your work fits.
• End this slide with your hypotheses, or create a new slide with your hypotheses and verbally state them.

4. Research Design

• This slide should describe your research design, including your methods and procedures (e.g, data, model specification, etc).
• Don’t just say “quantitative methods” or “qualitative.” Be specific.
• Name your dataset, unit of analysis, and method. (“Panel data, municipality-level, OLS regression,” for example).
• Think: if someone wanted to know what exactly you did, would they get it from your slide?

5. Findings

• 1–2 slides is enough.
• Plots > tables. If you can’t read the table, don’t include it.
• Pick the most important results—the ones that tell your story. Don’t dump everything you’ve got. We know you work a lot, but remember sometimes less is more–> KISS, keep it simple stupid

6. Conclusion & Next Steps

• Remind us what you found (probably just in written, no time to orally go over it).
• Add 1–2 items on what it means, why it matters, or where you’ll take it next.
• Implications, implications!

Final Slide

• Skip the giant “THANK YOU.” Instead, keep your conclusion slide up and just add a little “Thanks!” + your email at the bottom. That way during Q&A people still see your project, not a blank thank-you screen.

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Good Habits

• Keep it simple. No bullet points longer than one line. No more than 4–5 bullets per slide.
• Time. You should spend roughly 1.5-2 min speaking about each slide. Do not rush over 100 slides.
• Use visuals. Graphs and images grab attention, and people remember them. One coefficient plot is probably much better than a regression table. If you still go for the table, use colors, pausing, etc.
• Consistency counts. Same fonts, same style. No rainbow gradients or clip art. I use a few colors to highlight, but stick to 2/3 no 20 colors.
• Practice. Enough that you don’t need to read slides word-for-word. You should know what’s coming next.
• Q&A prep. Ask a friend to throw questions at you. Practice answers.
• Prioritize. Regarding the results, do your best to prioritize your findings. DO NOT share ALL OF YOUR RESULTS. Be smart, prioritize. When you are doing presentations less is more. If you overwhelm the audience with hundreds of data or visualizations they will miss the point. Think about what story you are telling and the best way to show what you have done. If you are unsure about which things to prioritize, speak with your mentors and they can help you make decisions.

Script and practice

• If you are worried about rambling, write out a script and practice it. You can use have speaker notes function in powerpoint (or some other program) to add your talking points. If you use a script, practice it enough so that you can look up and do not appear to just be reading.
• Speak clearly and slowly. Make sure your audience can understand what you are saying.
• Use eye contact. Look at your audience as you speak, and make sure you are making eye contact with everyone in the room.
• Ask your mentor to help you practice the Q&A part of your presentation. Have them think with you about what kinds of questions people might ask, and discuss how you might respond.
• Practice, practice and practice more. The more you practice, the more confident you will be when you deliver your presentation.
• Are you prepared? A good rule of thumb is to be able to close your eyes and know your presentation so well that you know what comes next without seeing the next slide. One way to get prepared is to practice the presentation a few times without slides so that you know exactly what to say without having the slides in front of you as prompts.

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Bad Habits (don’t do these!)

• If you have hundreds of slides, and you skip them while presenting it shows that you did not plan accordingly.
• Talking longer than the time limit → not cool. It is not respectful to the people in the room.
• Saying “you probably can’t read this table” → if you know that, don’t use it.
• Drowning the audience in every single result you ever ran. Pick the highlights.
• Reading from your slides in a monotone → trust me, people tune out fast.
• Be too apologetic: you are telling a story if you sound very apologetic or insecure, why will I pay attention to you?

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👉 The vibe: less is more, tell a story, keep the audience awake, and make it clear what you actually did and found.