PhD Student Tips for Preparing a Scientific Conference Presentation

Conference presentations for PhD work go smoother when slide planning is treated like a timed, audience-aware design problem—not a last-minute formatting task. After multiple talks in a busy stretch, Kiera’s core takeaway is that good conference delivery comes from matching slide volume to the allotted minutes, building in backup material for unexpected questions, and keeping visuals clean enough that the audience can follow without wading through dense text.

Her experience spans two 20-minute conference talks with 10 minutes of Q&A, plus a “doctoral consortium” pitching event where researchers present their plans to a panel and receive mentor feedback before the session. For the long-paper format, she followed a rule of thumb from her supervisor: roughly one content slide per minute. That guidance translated into about 25 slides for a 20-minute slot, though she ultimately landed closer to 30—partly because extra slides help prevent uncomfortable rambling when timing runs tight. The same logic carried into the doctoral consortium, where she also used around 30 slides. She adds a practical refinement learned from startup pitching: include appendix or backup slides so that if a question arrives that wasn’t covered in the main sequence, the presenter can quickly switch to the relevant extra material instead of improvising under time pressure.

Slide structure matters as much as slide count. For her case-based reasoning paper, she mirrored the paper’s organization: brief domain motivation (including why marathon running matters to the problem), the two main tasks (race time prediction and training-plan recommendations), methodology and how cases were generated, results presented through graphs, then a conclusion with implications and future work, ending with a thank-you slide. She emphasizes that even when the conference audience already understands the research framework (case-based reasoning), the talk still needs enough domain context—here, marathon running—so the audience can connect the methods to a real-world setting.

On design, she pushes for visual clarity over wordiness. Her supervisor limited slides to only a couple of lines at a time, and she found that pictures do the heavy lifting: stock images from Pixels (linked through her entrepreneurship course) were repeatedly praised during practice because they look higher quality than typical Google image grabs and help “bring you in” without clutter. She also argues that slides should support the talk rather than replace it—dense text forces the audience to read instead of listen.

She recommends a simple, consistent theme for academic settings: white background, black text, and minimal transitions or flashy color schemes. That approach contrasts with more colorful, attention-grabbing styles used in startup environments, where the goal is different. Finally, she treats practice as non-negotiable. Presenting to a research group (and getting feedback on unclear concepts or which graphs need more time) helps tighten explanations and reduces surprise questions. For online conferences, she used Mac Keynote’s “record presentation” feature to redo sections after mistakes, then timed the talk so she could hit clear checkpoints (e.g., slide targets at 5, 10, and 15 minutes). The result is a presentation that’s easier to deliver under pressure and easier for the audience to follow.