MSc Seminar KF2, KF4, 2019 Spring

Details

Rules

1. Each student will present a 20-minute talk based on his/her MSc thesis topic.
2. The talk should be as comprehensible as possible to your fellow students.
3. Prepare slides in pdf.
4. You should give a practice talk on the Wednesday before your talk, or earlier. On Wednesdays, I'm available between 8:00-12:00 and between 14:00-16:00. Contact me the week before the talk to find a time for your practice talk, either in person, or via email at palyi at mail dot bme dot hu.
5. The practice talk should take 20 minutes, and it is followed by a discussion that takes at most 30 minutes.
6. In the seminar session, use your own computer for the talk, but also bring along the slides on a pendrive, just in case your computer does not work with the projector.
7. Test if the projector works with your computer before the session starts.
8. Be prepared to take questions.
9. Each talk is followed by 15-minute discussion, during which the audience has to write a summary of the talk in 5-10 sentences in a google survey. This is done in pairs. Please do bring your laptop even if you're not the speaker, to make sure that you can complete this task.
10. I send the summaries as a single pdf file to the speaker. He/She will decide if it should be published in some way. I'm glad to publish the summaries here, if the speaker wishes so.
11. You should email me the final version of the slides right after your talk.
12. You can miss at most 3 classes.
13. The grade will be determined based on the quality of the presentation. Not giving a practice talk, or cancelling a talk, can result in a lower grade.

Schedule

Guidelines

• Many researchers post on the web their advice on how to make good talks. An example from a theoretical physicist is here (section 6). Another principle that is worth considering is this one from a mathematician. Probably it doesn't make sense to blindly follow any of such advice, but it does make sense to read those and consider applying the suggestions.
• When you present the results of a research activity, it might make the presentation more comprehensible if you clearly separate various types of information. One way to do this is to follow this scheme:
  1. Describe the physical setup.
  2. Describe which physical quantities are treated as control parameters.
  3. Describe which physical quantities are measured or calculated.
  4. Pose a question that is addressed in your work.
  5. Show the result: the graph of the experimental data, or the graph of the numerical or analytical results, or the formula obtained.
  6. List the main features of the results.
  7. If possible, explain in simple terms, the “physical origin” of each feature.
  8. If possible, describe the consequences drawn from the results.