Here is where I admit in a previous life I was an actress, obviously not an amazing one as I still don’t have my Oscar but luckily I have just got something that feels pretty close to one!
When you tell people you used to be an actress people often assume that you are a confident public speaker, however there is a big difference between acting and presenting your research. Acting is more about presenting someone else’s work and you can hide behind a character whereas presenting your own research feels a lot more personal. You are sharing something you have spent a huge amount of time and effort thinking about, planning and conducting and that can feel scary. It is, however, an important aspect of being a researcher. Conducting research and publishing in journals isn’t enough anymore, you need to be able to engage with other people, whether that is the patients who may be affected by your research, the participants who took part or the general public. Talking about your research to many different audiences is a vital skill required to survive academia.
A few months ago my supervisor nominated me for the INSIGHTS Doctoral Thesis Public Lecture competition, this first part of the process was based on the research abstract and supervisors application, six people were selected to go on to have training to put together a presentation…. Well I didn’t get through this stage.
A couple of weeks before the semi-finals I got an email to say that someone had unfortunately had to drop out and I was the first runner up, would I be interested in taking part? I decided that I probably wouldn’t get very far but it would be a good experience and free training. So I agreed.
A week later I had put together a vague outline of a presentation and turned up for a training session with Jackie Dack, a theatre director who specialises in helping people with presentations. It was one of the best training sessions I have ever had, and really made me think about every aspect of presenting. The words I used and whether they were easily understood, what was on my slides and how I physically moved and expressed myself during the presentation. She asked how brutal we wanted her to be…..I picked very! I don’t regret it, sometimes you really need brutal honesty to improve what you are doing.
The main point I learnt through this training and putting together my talk was the need to have a story, all research has a story but it can sometimes be tricky to find it. Humans love a good story, it is how we’ve always passed information on and catching people’s interest this way helps them engage with you and what you are doing. For some people the story comes from you the researcher, why you do what you do. For others the story comes from the process or your findings.
My research is on routes to diagnosis in head and neck cancer and how patients experience this route and their diagnosis of cancer. I picked to tell my research story through the patient’s words as not only were they impactful but I felt that this was a story which would resonate with most people. So that was my starting point tell the patients journey.
The next stage was the semi-finals; six of us presented our talk to four judges, one person was selected through online voting based on their topic and then two others were selected by the judges. This was a great opportunity to do the talk in a safe environment and get feedback. We luckily didn’t have to wait too long for the results and Richy let us know that Alex, Ramtin and I had won the competition and would be doing our public lecture in one week.
So a week later at 4.30pm I found myself stood in a glass box waiting to get into the Curtis Auditorium to see what it was like. I’d felt pretty calm up until that point but the nerves really kicked in when I saw the size of the room, and then when I saw the amount of people coming in. I’d invited my supervisor, family and friends as well as people from the local head and neck charity I had worked with. There was something even more terrifying about doing this lecture in front of these people than the people I didn’t know. These were the people who had supported me through my PhD and had invested a lot of time and effort in me so I felt it was important to show them what I had achieved during this time.
Waiting to go on was terrifying, I won’t deny it, but once I was up and talking about my research I loved it. It was fantastic to look around the audience and see people nod when they recognised something I was saying. The questions at the end gave me the opportunity to see what people felt about my research and what they wanted to know more about. There was definitely a need to understand how my research would impact the current service provided and what changes I thought could improve this. It was great to see that people understood the potential impact of this type of research and that they also felt it was important.
We get used to talking about our research at conferences, symposiums and with other students and academics in similar areas to us, and we get used to using academic language, so this opportunity gave me the chance to really get out of my “box” to think about how my research might be perceived and understood by people not in my research area. I had to change how I thought about my research what the important points were and how this could be expressed in a way that wasn’t only informative but also interesting to the audience, after all the majority of the audience were there for a fun and interesting night out.
Would I recommend this to anyone else? Yes, it was an amazing experience and I enjoyed the whole process, from writing the talk through to the semi-finals and the main event. It has changed how I think about my presentations and how I will approach them in the future. It was also an amazing adrenaline rush. We are incredibly lucky in this faculty to have many different opportunities to develop other skills so if you have the chance take it.
In true Oscar style I’d also like to say thank you to my supervisor Linda Sharp for nominating me, Joanne Patterson, Jackie Dack for the fantastic training session and the brutal feedback, Richy Hetherington for organising it all, the judges, John Kirby and the INSIGHTS team.
Written by Jennifer Dean, PhD Student in the Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University.