As a new semester begins, it also means another round of seminar presentations are underway as well. If that line confused you, let me explain what I mean about seminar presentation. Most pharmacy schools in the US require a seminar (aka a PowerPoint presentation) during your fourth year of pharmacy school that you have to present in front of your peers.
It’s a presentation where you share in great details about either a new drug or treatment plan or a new indication for a drug. There are usually a ton of different options that students can choose from or discuss. Mine was on a new drug that was recently released called voxelotor for sickle cell disease. But the kicker about this seminar presentation is that you can’t graduate from pharmacy school until you pass this presentation (at least at most pharmacy programs). So as you can imagine this presentation can be very stressful for pharmacy students and it can be a pretty big deal.
Which is why in today’s post, I’m going to be sharing my tips and tricks on how to make an amazing seminar presentation and how to pass with flying colors!
Prepare ahead of time
As cliché as it sounds, starting a few months before your deadline is the best way to make sure you pass your pharmacy school presentation. From finding the perfect articles to back up your idea/theory to finding people to review your presentation, it can be a lot, especially if you wait until the last minute. Please do not do this! Go ahead and start working on it a few months prior to your due date. What I liked to do is work on my seminar presentation a little bit by little bit to make it feel less daunting of a task.
Diversify your PowerPoint slides
While most of your classmates won’t be playing your presentation any attention, your graders definitely will be. Add a little spice to your presentation by switching up your slides constantly throughout your presentation and by using SmartArt to create some unique slides. I like to do a mix of all text slides, title slides, 1 picture slide, and half & half text and pictures.
This way it keeps your audience engaged with the material while also giving you a break to go deeper into a specific topic, such as a slide with just a graph on it. If you want to be extra spicy, add in a short video or questions throughout your presentation. Just remember that most of these presentations have a time limit, so you’ll want to make sure you stay within that guideline even if you have technological difficulties.
Review your presentation over and over again
I can’t count the number of typos and little mistakes that I found on my presentation when I would go through my slides every week. Because you are stressed out and trying to do your work for your P4 rotations, those smaller details can get skipped over and forgotten. Before the big day, I highly recommend you going over your slides constantly checking for errors. I had even found errors in a table that I had made one night for my presentation, which thankfully I caught a few days prior to my presentation day.
Have multiple people review your presentation prior to the big day
By starting early enough, you’ll leave yourself with enough time to have a few people that you trust to review your presentation. For seminar presentation, you’re usually assigned a professor that specializes in your topic or who is very knowledge in the area to mentor you through the process. But the more the merrier honestly, so ask a few other professors that aren’t mentoring students for their feedback.
The best way to ask for feedback is to just ask nicely and make sure that you give them enough time to send their feedback back to you without rushing them. I would say send out requests 2-3 weeks before your deadline, so you have plenty time to make changes based on the feedback that you get.
Anticipate questions
Just like any presentation, you’ll want to anticipate the questions that you may get. The easiest way to do that is go slide by slide and generate your own questions based on your material. Some questions will come naturally because they are a given, but others you may have to dig deep to think of some good ones. Some of the common questions that people will ask during your seminar presentation are:
- What is the number needed to treat or number needed to harm in your studies?
- Would you recommend the use of this drug? Why if no or yes?
- How does this new therapy compare to other drugs already on the market or being used?
- What are the other indications for this drug already?
Make your presentation strategically
A really important tip that is really perfect for any presentation that you may have is to create your presentation strategically. What I mean by this is you want to leave some slides vague enough so that you can go into more details in your presentation or so your graders will ask you questions about it later. This way you can kind of control the kind of questions that you may have at the end of it. Because the way that you answered those questions will also affect your final grade.
Don’t worry about your fellow classmates
Like I said earlier, most of your classmates are not going to be playing you any attention. They’ll either be on their phone, watching the clock, or lowkey falling asleep. At my school, they didn’t allow for computers or phones to be out so that it wasn’t disrespectful for the student presenting. But the nice thing is that you may only have to present to a small group of students depending on how your school does their seminar presentation. Either way, focus on what you can control and don’t worry about the rest!
Practice, Practice, and Practice some more
The best way to get more comfortable with public speaking and your material is by practicing and practicing it some more until you’ve got that thing memorized. For me when I get nervous, I tend to talk faster and lower, so I had to practice slowing down my breathing and projecting my voice. In my presentation, one of my friends actually sat it on my presentation and gave me clues when I was going too fast, which was really helpful. Whatever your habits are, make note of them during your practice session, so that way you can try to curve them before your presentation day.
If you don’t know the answer, say this instead of ‘I don’t know”
If you do not know the answer to a question from a grader, make sure to say that you are not entirely positive on the answer, but you will gladly look up the information and get back to your grader later on the answer. Then actually go look it up and do what you said. The biggest reason is because your graders do keep track of this information, and you don’t want it to affect your grade later on.
You may also like: 5 Tips to Creating an Amazing Topic Discussion, A Student’s Guide to Getting Involved in Research, and 5 Lessons I Learned in My Third Year in Pharmacy School
