Contributed Talks
Oral presentations will be 15 minute or 5 minute speed talks. The 15 minute slots include 12 minutes for the presentation and 3 minutes for questions; 5 minute speed talks are 5 minutes total for the slot, but with a Q&A period for all at the end of the session.
For 15 minute talks, please plan for your talk to be 12 minutes; session chairs will interrupt any presentation exceeding 14.5 minutes (for 15 minute slots) or 5 minutes (for speed talks) to remain on schedule. Faculty–this applies especially to you!
All laptops hosting presentations will be running Windows 11 OS with Microsoft PowerPoint 365. Please be sure that your presentation is compatible with this version of PowerPoint. Presenters will NOT be allowed to use their own computers. Digital projectors and microphones will be available for all presentations.
Presenters should upload their talks to the WSN drive online:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1xuR6hKXHepdyR43q_gs6SZCUNIzN-mwV
Upload your presentation slides to the folder in this drive corresponding to your session and day of the week. Symposia and other plenary sessions have individual folders; contributed talks are in a separate folder organized by room and then by day. Acceptable file types are Powerpoint (.pptx) and Adobe pdf (.pdf). These will be projected from a laptop running Windows 11. Please limit file size to 100 MB.
Name your file using the time of your presentation and the presenter’s last name. For example, a presentation at 3:15 pm by Linda Hamilton would be 1515_Hamilton.pptx. Please upload all files before 5pm on Thursday Nov 7. There will be opportunities to check your presentation for appearance, animations, etc. at the registration desk.
Presenters are strongly encouraged to preview their presentations on a Windows 11 computer before preparing to upload. Note that presentations created in Mac OS or Linux may appear differently in Windows. If your presentation includes video, please ensure that any video files that need to accompany the presentation to play correctly are also uploaded.
Important Information for Talks
- Include a title slide in your presentation with your name, pronouns, affiliation, and any other parts of your personal identity that you feel comfortable sharing
- We will include live captioning for all talks for the meeting this year; captioning should appear below your slides automatically, but we recommend testing your layout with captions on the newest version of PowerPoint, in order to make sure the captions don’t overlap with the content of the slide
- Use sans serif fonts that are very clear to read, such as Arial or Helvetica
- Prepare slides for widescreen format (16:9)
- Use a font size of 24 pts or more for body text and 36 pts or more for headings
- Avoid using red and green color combinations to distinguish separate groups (there are several places online that you can use to check whether your color combinations are accessible)
- Avoid more than seven lines of text on a single slide
- Use inclusive language on your slides and in your presentation (e.g. “they” instead of “he or she”)
- Define key terms and identify words presented from languages that your presentation is not given in
- If using Microsoft PowerPoint, use the Accessibility Checker feature to check your slide content
Presentation Tips
- Speak slowly and clearly
- Describe visual content and try to minimize visual and auditory distractions
- If possible, use a pointer to indicate the visual content you’re referring to
- Avoid microaggressions and “othering” terms or phrases
- Include content warnings for sensitive material, if applicable
Tips for 5-minute Presentations
Presentation content. Compared to a typical 12-minute talk, one generally gets right to the point in a 5-minute talk, and the proportion of time devoted to results is usually higher. The results are central to your message, so be sure to emphasize them. Methods can be covered in less detail than in a longer talk, and viewers can always follow up with questions about methods if they have them. An example content breakdown for a 5-minute talk at a WSN meetings in min:sec could look like:
- Title slide (don’t forget to list your co-author(s)!): 0:15
- Introduction: 1:00
- Methods: 0:30
- Results: 2:30
- Discussion / Conclusions: 0:45
That breakdown is just a rough guideline. If you need to spend more time on detailed methodology, discussing counterintuitive results, etc., you should absolutely do so. As with any talk, you will just need to decide how to balance adding more of one thing at the cost of omitting some detail on another.
Contributed Posters
The WSN poster session will be on Saturday in the afternoon. Judging for best student poster will take place throughout each session, and questions addressed to presenters constitute one of the criteria on which student posters are judged.
- The Easels are 8′ wide x 4′ high including the border and will hold two posters on a side; posters MUST fit in into a space that is smaller than half of this width.
- Rectangular posters can use either a portrait or landscape orientation.
- For Landscape, we recommend a 40″ wide x 30″ high size; for Portrait, we recommend a 33″ x 44″ size.
- Presenters are responsible for placing their own posters and for taking them down at the conclusion of their poster session. Stick pins will be provided.
All poster presenters are requested to put up their poster between 12 and 1:30pm on Saturday. All posters will remain up for the entire poster session. Those with even-numbered posters should be present at their poster from 1:30-2:30pm. Those with odd-numbered posters should be present at their poster from 2:30-3:30. All posters will need to be taken down promptly at 3:30 pm.
See links for the forms/rubrics used for judging posters and presentations. These provide everyone with an idea of what criteria are important for selecting awardees.
Poster Tips
The goal of a poster is to turn your work into a self-guided tour that tells the story of your research. Like a talk, posters must catch and maintain the interest of the reader. The information should be primarily visual with limited amounts of text, and text must be readable from 3-4 feet away. Include figures/photos with clear descriptive captions.
The following websites offer useful guidelines and suggestions for preparing posters:
http://www.utexas.edu/ugs/our/poster
http://abacus.bates.edu/~bpfohl/posters/
http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign
We strongly recommend consulting with your faculty mentor as you prepare your poster.