Gave a "first round practice" talk today for a conference. The talk is to be a 30 minute presentation on a paper describing a fair amount of work. The paper was submitted to a conference with a very general science theme, and (woohoo!) got accepted for a presentation. As I am a conference presentation virgin I'm spending oodles of extra time on it. In fact, the actual talk is not until late January. But here at Bitterly Cold U., we have a graduate seminar which provides a nice forum for "dry runs" like this. As the semester is coming to a close, today happened to be the last possible one until next semester.
I've found creating the talk to be rather challenging. Part of the problem is that 30 minutes is rather short. Nevertheless, it's a reasonable chunk of time that I can work with. No, the issue has been depth. An age-old problem I suppose. It's one of my first experiences banging my head against this particular stone, though. An added hurdle to the depth issue is the broad topic of the conference. Does that mean my audience will likely include many non-mathy persons? If so, how broad do I go? If the talk is too broad and shallow, it'll run aground. Nevertheless, if it's mostly non-mathy folk in the audience I would hate to drown them. I have so far erred on the side of too shallow. But this goes against my inclination, which is be far more thorough (as per my mathematical training). Luckily, I have a little time.
The talk in front of my fellow grad students went smoothly. It showed me a few places for improvement (places for clarifying bullets/slides). And it was only 25 minutes, so I even have time to include them.
Maybe I'll do round II in front of my running buddies. That would be a thoroughly broad audience. Nice litmus test....
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