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Thursday, March 11, 2021 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm(New York Time) Add to my calendar
Exploring Online Presentation Skills for Engaging Your Audience
To present to a technical audience is challenging. To kindle curiosity and fire up your non-technical audience with your complex research—whether in person or online—is even more challenging, but developing such skills will be lifetime career assets.
The “virtual” medium, in particular, is fraught with technical and physical limitations, surprises, and, yes, wrong assumptions, easily leading you astray, e.g., from a professional posture. Then there is bandwidth, video resolution, microphone quality, your physical disconnect from your audience and slide(s), and more.
Our webinar contrasts “virtual” with in-person presentations, suggesting do’s and don’ts, with specific focus on the Microwave Week virtual Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition. We draw on experience: writing and directing plays, running entrepreneurial and exhibition booths, mentoring and coaching candidates for competitive presentations, as well as delivering relevant talks, webinars and workshops. We discuss storytelling, first impressions, citation, subtext, authenticity, articulation, script design, slide design, staging, stage presence, and respecting your audience.
We analyze 3MT® case studies from past IMS and Microwave Week 3MT® competitions, focusing on titles, slides, scripts, and opening and closing lines. While we expect students and young professionals to be our primary audience, professors and practicing engineers from industry should equally appreciate this webinar.
Meanwhile, check out our previous four related MTT-S webinars and watch videos from prior Microwave Week 3MT® competitions on the MTT-S IMS YouTube channel.
Professor, McMaster University
John Bandler, OC, McMaster professor emeritus, is an engineer, entrepreneur, innovator, artist, speaker, and author of fiction, including stage plays (see YouTube). Fellow of several societies, and winner of both the Microwave Application and Microwave Career Awards from IEEE MTT-S, he has published 500+ papers; pioneered space mapping; sold his start-up to Hewlett-Packard; is an Officer of the Order of Canada; and winner of the Professional Engineers Ontario 2018 Gold Medal. He has coached 100’s of individuals for presentations, and co-organizes 3MT® competitions, including the IMS 3MT®.
Assistant Professor, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Erin Kiley is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She is an applied mathematician whose research specializes in modelling and computational electromagnetics, including problems in microwave sintering. She received her B.Sc. (Mathematics and Statistics) and B.A. (Russian) from the University of New Hampshire, and her M.Sc. (Applied Mathematics) and, in 2016, her Ph.D. (Mathematics) from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She co-organized all four 3MT® Competitions for the IEEE International Microwave Symposium, an event she is also co-organizing for 2021.
GSRA, McMaster University
Daniel Tajik is a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering developing microwave image processing algorithms for use in medical diagnostics. In 2017, he won both the First Place and Audience Choice Awards in the first ever 3MT® competition at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium. In 2018, he won first place for the same presentation in the first ever Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate 3MT® competition at McMaster University. He is a member of the 2021 Microwave Week 3MT® committee.
Georgia Institute of Technology
Aline Eid is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Receiver of 16 awards during her masters and PhD studies, inventor in 4 patents, and author/co-author of more than 25 conference and journal papers, she won both the Second Place and Audience Choice Awards in the IEEE IMS2019 3MT® competition. She also gained First Place in the Student Design Competition and Honorable Mention in the Student Paper Competition. Her goal is to develop the next generation of 5G/mm-wave-powered consumer devices. She is a member of the 2021 Microwave Week 3MT® committee.