Seventeenth Annual Symposium on Metallurgical and Materials Research

This year's Symposium was held during 6-7 November 2003. It was a truly outstanding event; it showcased effectively the excellent research being carried out in different groups in our Department.

I was asked to be a judge for the students' presentations; Prof. N. Ravishankar, my colleague from MRC, was the other judge.

First, my congratulations to all the students. The overall level of the talks was uniformly good. And, of course, special congratulations to the prize winners:

• Krishanu Biswas
• Sanjit Bhowmick
• Regin Raghavan
• N. Suma

All, and I really mean all, the students used computer-based presentation tools; almost all used PowerPoint, while a few used the combination of LaTex-Prosper-Acrobat. Considerable effort went into making good, readable and pleasant slides. The talks had a smooth flow - again, evidence of good, solid preparation. Everyone - except one or two - finished his/her talk within the allotted time of 15 minutes; most made good use of it; a few finished earlier, probably because they had only preliminary results from their ongoing research.

I was present for 20 out of the 32 talks by our students; I would rate all of them as good. Of course some were better; aside from the talks by the prize winners, I can recall at least three talks which were very good (Victoria, Guru, Deep). My observation is that with every passing year, there is considerable improvement in the talks given by the same student; so, it is not surprising to see that many of the very good talks are by experienced students.

Having said that, I now turn to the question: are there guidelines to help a student who is new to the game of giving impressive talks (and it is a game, requiring certain skills, which can be learned)? Since there were so many good talks in this year's Sympo, I am convinced that all the raw materials are in place: background research, results from one's own research, sincere effort and enthusiasm for communicating one's ideas. Improvement in just a few areas could have converted some of the good talks into great ones. I outline some of these areas below:

• Tailoring the talk to suit the time constraints: Typically, one does many things in one's thesis research; covering all of them would require a lot more time. Therefore, it is better to focus on only one or two facets of one's research; in other words, present a short, coherent story, even though it may form only a part of your research. Example: Sanjit Bhowmick, who recently presented his work in an hour-long colloquium, decided to concentrate on just one part of his work. This focus helped him to deal with the subject at a much deeper level.
• Tailoring the talk to suit the audience: each student works in a very specialized topic; but the audience has a diverse background. Thus, it is very important to set the scene of one's research. An effective way is to start with a broad map of areas/questions related to your research, and point out where your research fits in that map; similarly, one may also touch upon (as and when necessary) answers provided by your research to broader questions which are important in related areas. Again, using Sanjit's talk, recall his slide admitting that his work is not applicable to all kinds of thin films; this slide makes you think about other possible types of thin films, and in what way their behaviours might be different. I admit that Sanjit did not address these issues; just pointing them out is good enough!
• Make sure that you present a reasonably good analysis of your results. It is clearly not enough to present all the results, and say "that's it, folks!". You also have to address, at some level, the following question: "what is the meaning of it all?" (apparently, "24" is not the correct answer, but I digress ...), Sanjit may not have answered this question, but recall that less than 30 percent of his slides were on his experimental observations; most of the others were for explaining these observations.

I also have the following suggestions for the organizers of next year's Sympo:

• Ensure that at least some members of the present organization team are coopted into your team. This will help in avoiding wheel-reinvention.
• Get rid of the largely ceremonial (and, in my opinion, unproductive) inaugural function, which has such a poor attendance, anyway. If you are interested in impressing some of the top administrators, personally invite them to participate in the Sympo; or, do a campus-wide blitzkrieg, so that everyone is impressed!
• If you agree with the idea that invited speakers should have a decent number of people in the audience, scheduling their talks at 9:30 a.m. or 2:00 p.m. is a poor implementation of the idea. I suggest that these time slots be used exclusively for the talks by the organizers!
• If you agree that the audience should be representative of the entire cross section of the Department (faculty, research students, ME students and project assistants), then you need to find out why the audience this year had such a poor representation from ME students and, to a smaller extent, from the faculty.
  I have a conjecture about the first year ME students: perhaps this is a bad time of the year for them, with exams just a couple of weeks away; if so, January first week, when they choose their project advisors, is probably a better time; presumably, they would be sufficiently interested in finding out more about the research in each group.

---

Originally written on 10 November 2003

---

---