Week in advance: 15-21 February

... and a few words from last week's conference.

Before jumping into my plans for this week, I had just a couple thoughts from my conference last week in sunny Nelson (although I spent most of the week in conference rooms).  First off I gave a talk and while I have a number of personal rules for how to prepare a conference presentation I have decided not to go into detail.  The strategy I use to layout slides and time my speaking may not work for others and rather than claim to have perfected the art of conference speaking, I'll leave it to the reader to form an approach that works for them.  However, I will say that practicing your talk is an absolute must.  There is no leeway here, it is essential that you rehearse your presentation well in advance.  And remember this takes time... a 15 minute time slot (about a 12 minute talk leaving room for questions) will take over an hour just for 4-5 dry runs.  Be prepared to commit serious blocks of time to practicing.  Personally I memorise my entire presentation.  I am of the mind that a presenter needs to know what their next slide says, before they click to it; it's easy to waste a minute plus if you have to "review" the contents of each slide as it goes up, not to mention how disjointed your talk becomes.  Practice.  It's not an option.

Another quick thought from the conference, and this is really just to throw it out there, I typically walk away from a day's worth of talks with my head spinning.  While I enjoy hearing about other research, most talks go over my head.  As a PhD student you are an extremely early career researcher and you focus much of your energy into one or two topics.  With that background, you can expect to keep up with every talk at a conference (at least I don't think so).  Try to take as much from the sessions as possible, but don't feel as if you are the only one not following the speaker's talk.

Now moving on to this week...

I plan to keep up my two hour a day writing strategy, this seems to have worked in weeks past.  Additionally, this week I plan to sequester myself in the library (or similar isolated zone) to spent some serious time reading.  Ideally the reading, processing and writing will become a closed loop where one leads into the next.  Finally each day I'll spend time in the lab working on experiments, coding and design (ultimately just keeping projects moving forward); the key here will be prioritising my work so that this time does eat into my reading/writing sessions.