Attendance and Presentation Rules

The topic for each presentation, and presentation time must be selected at the beginning of the quarter. Any change of the presentation topic and/or time must be discussed with the faculty responsible for the graduate seminar.

Time your presentation so that it fits into a 40-45 minutes time slot, with an additional 5 minutes question period. You will have to rehearse your presentation to make sure that it fills the time slot without running over it. Visual aids (usually overhead transparencies) are strongly recommended to convey the maximum information in this limited time.

The talks will be evaluated by the students and a faculty member. The speaker feedback form is placed on the seminar home page. Read it carefully! It will help you prepare your talk and also make you ready to evaluate other presentations. In your ratings, please justify any very high or very low number with appropriate comments!

An effective presentation requires careful preparation and practice. Try to follow the following guidelines:

Keep your slides simple

Introduce one concept per slide

Use simple block lettering with large fonts

Do not use complex drawings

Use 5 to 8 words per line and up to 8 lines per slide

All graduate students registered for the seminar are required to write a two page summary of each presentation attended. The summary have to include the title and the date of the presentation, name of the speaker, name and mail box number of the reporting student, followed by the introduction, brief description of the proposed approach, and at least two reference sources relevant to the presented topic (an example summary is shown here).