Resources

Subject and Skills Workshop

All those taking part in the UG Research Conference are invited to attend a series of Subject and Skills Workshops, which will provide you with a chance to interact with students from around the Lancaster Partnership, and to hone your skills. Subject and Skills Workshops will take place via Teams, and the timetable will be announced in due course.

Skills Workshops will include:

  • Research Ethics
  • Applications for PG study and Life as a PG student
  • Research and Employability Skills
  • Research and Cross Cultural Competencies

Presentation Skills

Plan

Plan what you want to communicate about your research.

There’s a difference between conducting your research, and communicating that research to an audience. In general, you might want to think about your communicating your research as making clear to the audience:

  1. What question you are asking. (Research Question)

  2. Why that question is important. (Relevance)

  3. How you have attempted to establish an answer. (Method and Argument)

  4. Where you’ve arrived in your attempt to answer the question – your conclusion, if you’ve reached one, or your current position, if you’ve not. (Conclusion or Current Position)

  5. How this research should impact future research or real world practice. (Significance)

Remember that the UG Research Conference is a multidisciplinary conference, so the way you tackle each of these points should be suitable for a general audience.

Produce

Produce your research poster.

You will be producing an online research poster which summarises your research. Think very carefully about what the most important points under (a)-(e) to get across to your audience are. You can’t communicate everything about your research – and there’s no way to transplant the detailed knowledge from inside your head into the audiences’. That isn’t the goal.

Think about the ‘key messages’ you’d like them to take away, how they can be best communicated, and focus on generating interest in those. Don’t cram your poster too full – cutting is often very difficult, but you have to be ruthless in focusing on what your audience needs to hear about your project, rather than what you want to say. Your poster can contain text, diagraphs, pictures, links, and videos, so you can think creatively about how best to get your points across.

Take care over the formatting and consistency of style. Write simply. Try to read your words out loud – that’s often the best way of catching mistakes. You can add references to your poster, and a bibliography, to help your audience ‘find out more’.

Prepare

Prepare your research talk, if you are intending to give a talk at the event.

Most of you will decide also to give a talk at the Conference. As with the poster, you should think carefully here about the audience, who won’t necessarily be familiar with your discipline.

Think about how you signal what are your really central messages and what are merely points of interest – and try to make that clear to the audience. Be mindful about what an audience can be expected to follow. If you can get across 2-3 points very clearly and generate interest in learning more about your research, you will have been successful. Time spend at the beginning giving a brief ‘map’ of the talk won’t be wasted.

Think again in terms of how to communicate (a)-(e) above. In your talk, you should try and use non-technical language. You might like to design a PowerPoint to accompany your talk and make clear its structure, and finish by inviting the audience to view your poster for more information.

Practice

Practice giving your talk.

Make sure you have a sense of how to summarise your (a)-(e) above within the timeframe. Try not to ‘cram’ things in, and avoid the temptation to try and get extra information in by speaking quickly.

Give yourself a few trial runs, ideally in front of friends or family who aren’t familiar with the technicalities of your discipline. Can they follow well enough to formulate question afterwards that show they’ve really understood? If not, you may wish to simplify your presentation.

Simply things like introducing yourself well, eye contact, smiling, and natural pauses/pitch variation can go a long way to relaxing your audience and helping them become more receptive to the points you make.

Privacy, Recording and Behaviour Agreement

The Lancaster University Undergraduate Research Conference adheres to the Lancaster University Student Privacy Notice. We will use the details you give us in order to contact you about the UG Conference, and on the conference programme and website. We may, in order to facilitate collaboration and interaction between students, also share your details with other students who are participating in the Conference or staff at your Institution. Parts of the UG Conference and associated events will be recorded. This recording may be made available publicly and used in future promotional materials, as may feedback you offer in the process of the Conference. We adopt a zero tolerance to bullying, harassment, discrimination and sexual misconduct. Any instance will be investigated and where necessary, disciplinary sanctions used.