A 15-minute Presentation on your Thesis Problem Statement, Aug 2005

It is a good idea to begin your thesis year (BTech or MTech) with a short and crisp presentation defining your problem statement. The primary goal is to make sure that you have a good idea of what you are working on for your MTech/BTech projects. This will have a lot of good effects:

• First of course, it will give you a good idea of what exactly you are working on
• It will give others a good idea of what you are working on, so that future interactions can be better
• You will get to practise some presentation skills
• If your colleagues critique your (planned) work at this stage, that is a good thing: you can continue based on the feedback

The central point of the presentation is simple: to convey your problem statement to your colleagues. An important aspect of this is that the thesis advisor should not be involved in the explanation process.

See the writeup on "How to write a Good Report". A lot of the points are also relevant for presentations.

A good organization of the 15-minute presentation would be:

• Slide-1: Title
• Slide-2: Motivation, Background
• Slide-3: Problem Statement
• Slide-4: Related work
• Slide-5: Expected thesis contributions
• Slide-6: Methodology
• Slide-7: Progress so far
• Slide-8: Plan of action (timelines, publication)

It is very important that you get a lot of your colleagues and friends to attend the presentation. In turn, you can attend their presentation. Very importantly, the audience should ask as tough and annoying questions as possible. If the audience asks questions, the presenter will improve upon the quality of the work.