I have missed a couple posts over the past few days, due to the fact I am in Germany to attend a Rheo-NMR workshop. Travelling to Europe from New Zealand and vice versa takes about 25 hours worth of flights and an additional few hours during layovers on route. Additionally, at this time of the year, there is a 11 hour difference between New Zealand and Germany.
This trip was particularly exciting because although I arrived the day before the workshop, when I arrived I still need to finish my slides. And I need to practice and fine tune my presentation of the material. Building my slides wasn't an issue, it's just a time consuming process to get the formatting and layout just right. While it was easy to finish the slides in time and I didn't mind working on these the day before, my big mistake was not giving myself enough time to practice my talk. Additionally, I had 30 minutes at the conference, with a goal of speaking for ~25 minutes and leaving some time for questions. This is a much longer talk than I am use to, and longer by a factor of 2. What this means is that practice runs for this talk took twice as long as a "typical" conference presentation. So even with 2 hours to practice there was only time to run through 3-4 times. Additionally, it's exhausting to speak for 25 minutes straight, so with the night to prepare I was only able to run through the slides a handful of times.
Despite finishing the slides at the last minute and the limited time to practice, the workshop today went very well. There were some fabulous talks from leaders in the field. And when it came to my turn, I was pleased with my presentation. I did not go over time, but with the amount of questions I received, I did pass the 30 minute mark. Using questions as a gauge of how effective my talk was and how interesting the material was to the audience, I would say people were interested in my work. I received questions, which is always a good position to be, meaning that others engaged with the talk and felt my research was relevant. Also the questions I received indicated that folks understood the key points of my research and that I was able to communicate these ideas sufficiently during my presentation.
Tomorrow night I begin the day and half voyage back to New Zealand, but after a fantastic session today, I am more than happy I made the trip.
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