Presentation skills

  • Don’t be scared to practise. Everybody else does. You can do it anywhere: in the car, in the bath – no one else needs to know
  • If you have one, don’t become too attached to your ‘script’. You can rehearse too many times and sound stale
  • Use your natural, personal resources (your body, your voice and gestures) to express your enthusiasm for your subject
  • Go slower than you think is necessary. It always take listeners longer to assimilate what you’re saying than it will take you to say it 
  • Even if they don’t say anything, you should make your audience feel consulted, questioned and challenged - rather than just ‘told’.
  • Look for their signals – if someone wants to talk, if people are switching off etc. – if what you’re saying isn’t working, look for another way to say it.  If you don’t respond to your audience, you might as well have sent a video of yourself!
  • Treat your audience with as much respect as you would a group of your professional peers
  • Don’t overload your presentation with too much material on too many different topics. There’s only so much that students can take in
  • Practise your final moments and make sure that you end as though you have done well, even if you’ve been a bit shaky along the way.  You’re probably not the best judge of how you’ve done, so don’t tail off and fizzle out just because you think it’s gone a bit awry.  Ending strongly will leave the audience feeling satisfied regardless of how the rest of the presentation went
  • Most importantly: have fun!

Once you have finished a school visit, we would like to hear from you. As well as helping us maintain a current database of school contacts, we want to know how you got on. Please take the time to fill in a visit report and send it back to us.

 

WORD Faraday Engineer's report form (201 k) Updated 24 October 2007