A few hints how and what to present.
The presentation should take 20 mins (sharp), followed by the 10 mins discussion. Please tell your supervisor that you will be giving the seminar (I am not inviting them separately, and they should come). The order of talks within one seminar (typically there are 3) is fully your choice.
Please take with you "tangible" outputs of your PhD. programme (posters, published papers or manuscripts). This is an important part of your presentation and assessment.
For the presentation proper it is important:
- To make clear why your topic is interesting (i.e. what is known in the field, what is not known, and why it should be known). This provides the necessary context for your work (and also for the audience). People often tend to skip this part, but it should not be the case: it is one of the most important components of the talk (and of any presentation in science).
- Make clear what is the problem that you are going to study. This is an important guide for the audience in following your further steps.
- Make clear which methods you are using and why they are good for answering the question that you have. It is important to say what is the range of potential outcomes of your methods, and what individual possible outcomes tell you about the process/phenomenon that you want to study. It is not so important to talk extensively about the number of plots or Petri dishes in your data; one should concentrate on why these plots or Petri dishes are analyzed.
- Show results that you have and discuss what they mean (in the light of the preceding point) and say whether, how and when you intend to publish them.
- Discuss the future prospect of your study: what you plan to do more and why, and how it is related to what has already been done. A list of planned papers is welcome.