I’m giving a journal club presentation this Friday for the Howard Hughes research program that I’m in, and in preparation for the big day, I have been meeting with one of the faculty advisors to perfect my talk.
This particular faculty member is someone whom I greatly respect. I heard wonderful things about her long before meeting her, and she has really lived up to those expectations. Not only is she brilliant and a great researcher, but she is an excellent mentor as well. Let us call her Dr. A.
Before I left her office today, Dr. A told me that I should pay attention to my laser pointing techniques.
What? Laser pointing techniques? That even exists? Was this some weird research jedi training thing that I had never heard about before?
What’s funny though, is that after she explained to me what she meant, it made perfect sense.
She said that the point of a laser pointer (har har) was not to randomly wave it about or draw circles around everything or underline ever word as you read it or point to every single thing that you were talking about. It was to emphasize your main points and really hone in on what you were talking about. The audience is naturally drawn towards the little red, green, or heaven forbid, blue dot on the screen, and if you’re wildly gesturing around your slides, they’re going to get lost.
Her main piece of advice: Take control of the laser pointer.
It’s ok to not use it very much. Just because you have a laser pointer in your hand, doesn’t mean it has to be on all the time. If you have the discretion to know when to use it, and when to put it away, it will do so much more for your talk, and oftentimes, that can be the tiny difference that makes one talk better than another. Use the laser pointer to guide your audience– to tell your story– don’t use it to guide you.
I’ve given close to ten big presentations that have required the use of a laser pointer, and I know that I am one to just use the laser pointer to point at EVERY THING. For me, I think it’s a coping mechanism for nerves– I just point to things on the slide to feel like I am doing something. It’s something that I will make an effort to work on, now that I know that this problem exists. (It’s like the time my grad student told me that I said “um” too much during presentations. I wasn’t even aware of it until he told me about it, so now I make a conscious effort not to say “um” as much. He says I’m getting better. Yay!)
So today is Day 1 of my laser pointer training. I guess it’s considered Day 1 because it’s the first day that I’ve realized that there is such a thing as “laser pointer technique”.
Dr. A told me that there are some people who have bad laser pointing techniques and still have successful careers, but the purpose of our program is training.
So laser pointer training it is.
