- Show the examiners, and make them understand, clearly what you have achieved after about 400 hours of work over two semesters.
- Demonstrate to the examiners that you know very well what you have done.
- Keep the examiners happy.
- Keep only necessary words on the slides. A general rule of thumb is no more than 6 lines per slide.
- Use figures whenever possible.
- Keep the variety of fonts to minimal. I generally use two fonts at most (one for headers, one for body).
- Keep a set of backup slides. You should have more things to say about your project than the allocated 25 minutes. For the content that you have to cut from the main presentation, prepare slides for them as well, but keep them as a backup. If the examiners asked about it, you can pull up the backup slides and show them. It is good to anticipate questions from the examiners and prepare the slides to answer them.
- Check for typos. Badly prepared slides leave a bad impression.
- Give handouts of your slides to the examiners. It is useful if they want to refer back to your previous slides.
- It is always useful to show a short demo (no more than 2 mins) at the beginning of the presentation to give the examiners a concrete idea of what you have done. You can keep a complete or longer demo at the end. Also, in some cases, students run out of time and there is no time for a demo at the end. Showing a short demo at the beginning means you at least have a chance to show off your hard work.
- Make sure you explicitly say what YOU have done. Often, you built on top of other’s code, or work with another student on the project, or use someone else’s algorithms. Be very clear about your achievements and contributions. A slide listing your individual contributions is a must.
- It is always good to list the technical challenges you faced. Sometimes examiners may not appreciate your project, but in fact, it may take a few months of hard work. Listing the challenges would make the examiners appreciate what you have achieved.
- Do not assume that your examiners read your report. So do not leave out important things from the presentation.
- Tell the examiners explicitly if you leave some parts of the project out from the presentation due to time constraints.
- Keep the presentation of your project technical and academic-oriented as much as possible. This presentation is the pinnacle of your 4 years of bachelor's education. Show off what you have learned and how you applied them in your project.
- No examiner likes presentation that goes over time, so please practice and time yourself, and keep your presentation within the allocated time.
- Be adaptive in your presentation — prepare to cut some content if unexpected things happen and you are out of time. Mentally prepare which part of your presentation is important (can score points with examiners) and which part is optional (can refer examiners to the report).
- Listen carefully to the questions. If you do not understand the questions, ask the examiners to rephrase the question.
- Answer directly to the point of the questions.
- If you do not know the answer, just say you don’t know. Do not smoke. (Confucius said: Knowledge is: know what you know, and know what you do not know)
- Susan McConnel’s talk on how to give an effective scientific presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp7Id3Yb9XQ
No pulls allowed on gists... :-( Suggest you edit to include some other items I did on my fork.