Presentation Skills Can Make or Break Your Career

I am so excited for this conversation. Stacy and I met at a conference recently and I was very, very pleased that she agreed to come and give us a little background on what she does and to tell us a little bit about presentations. So, Stacy is a consultant and a coach specializing in presentation skills and communication strategy for biotech and life sciences professionals. And she has over 20 years in pharmacometrics, which we're going to talk about because that may be a career path that's unfamiliar to a lot of you at companies including Astellas, Metru Group, and Novartis. So she has seen firsthand how strong presentation skills can accelerate careers and how poor presentations can derail opportunities. Stacy now helps scientists and technical professionals across biotech move beyond overly technical talks to become visible, credible communicators who advance their careers through strategic presentation design and delivery. So, Stacy, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited about this.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

I'm really excited to be here. I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees. So I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes impact and gets promoted, you're in the right place. Awesome. So, first of all, pharmacometrics. I love to talk about career paths, but this is one we have not discussed in our community. Can you tell me what drew you to pharmacometrics? Originally, yes.

So I was a biomedical engineering student in college and I was planning to go into orthotics and prosthetics. That was my plan. Um, but I had a professor who offered an elective course in pharmaceutical sciences, and I didn't take it because I was interested in pharmaceutical sciences. And it was one of those lightning bolt moments where you're sitting there and all of a sudden you're just like, this is it. This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. And it was love at first sight for me. I saw just this basic, really simple thing that brought together my interest in medicine, but not blood math, computer science. And I thought, this is what I'M going to do. And some people may have actually heard pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. So I am a. I'm going to say PK and pd. I am a PK PD modeler by training. So pharmacokinetics has a lot of different branches to it. There's some study design. There are things that you can do in the lab. What I do is the mathematics behind it. And with pharmacokinetics, what we're trying to understand is how does the body process the drug? Once you take that drug, where does it go, how much goes where, how fast does it get in, how fast does it get out, how much goes where? And all of these things are sort of the mathematics behind it. So we take the dose, the concentration and the exposures to the drug, and we fit these to mathematical models. And from those models, we understand things about how much of the drug gets absorbed, how much of it gets distributed out of your system, how fast it gets absorbed and how fast it gets out. And this will differ between patients because patients are different age, weight, gender, other medications and things like that. So my job is to try to figure out, or was to try to figure out what is the right dose for the right patient population, given the fact that your demographics and other external factors can't impact how you process the drug. So that's the pharmacokinetics part, the pharmacodynamics part is how does the exposure beget the response. So this can be a positive response, it could be an efficacy of the drug, or it could be a negative response, like a side effect. And so we build mathematical models to look at the relationship between exposure and response so that we can get the right dose to the right patient. Because if you're too high, you have bad side effects. If you're too low, you don't have efficacy. So all of these things come into play when trying to come up with optimal dosing for patients. And I did that for 25 years in industry. But of course, what I'm doing now is completely different. It's helping the people who do what I did talk to people who don't do what I did. Because most of us are not the best communicators. We're technical nerds is what we are.

I love that. Yeah, it sounds very data heavy. There's a lot of number crunching in there, and that does tend to make people's eyes glaze over sometimes. So I can see that. Thank you. That was a great explanation. This is a career path that is one of those things that when people graduate from their PhD and they're like in the throes of basic research, that the world expert on one little aspect of one molecule, people don't really understand what it actually takes to make a drug. And this is huge, right? For people who are interested in maybe following in your footsteps, what can you tell them about your career? What was interesting and what to watch out for?

Sure. So I started my career at Novartis and I was a hands on PK PD modeler throughout my time there. What moved me to Astellus is a couple of things that are relevant to your group and one is networking. I know that you've been talking a lot about networking recently and the person who brought me to Astelas was a mentor of mine that I met through networking. So I always like to tell this story about Pete, who is now sort of my, my bestie and my extended family. And even though I don't work there anymore, and he calls me a traitor every day for not working there anymore, I met him in graduate school and we'd kept in touch through the years. And right as I was at this point at Novartis where I was ready to move on, I felt like I'd kind of done everything that I could there and grown as much as I could there. I got a call from Pete and he said, I'm at this company called Astellas in Chicago. I'm leading a modeling and simulation group. That's another term we use for pharmacometrics. He said, and I want you to come here and be my right hand person. And 11 years later, I mean, what an amazing opportunity it was. So first and foremost build that network because you're going to be able to meet people who might have a profound impact on your career like Pete did for me. So I reported to Pete and I started as a hands on, you know, individual contributor. But one of the things that he saw in me was leadership potential. And actually the reason we knew each other is because we volunteered together at aaps, which is a conference you and I met at, leading focus groups and sections and things like that. So he already knew that I had leadership potential, which is one of the reasons that he, he tagged me for this. So I'd say the other inflection point or maybe lesson learned for the folks that are in your group is volunteer. You know, get yourself out there, say yes to things, join committees and things like that because it again might have a profound effect on your Career that's really, really impactful.

We talk about that for introverts too, because I, I always. People go to these networking events and they'll come back and they'll report back and they'll say, I was really nervous to talk to people and all this, but when you're a volun and you're running the committee or what, like, people have to talk to you. So it just, it forces us introverts to like, we have to make the connections because we're in charge of something.

Expand your world in an amazing way. And people get to know you because you're volunteering for something ideally that you have passion for. And because of that, that comes out. If, if you're not good at small talk, but you're excited about nerding out on this very small minute thing that's going to help this organization, then people get to know you through that. A hundred percent agree with that. So because Pete saw that in me, he nurtured that. You know, he sent me to leadership training courses and things like that, and when the opportunity came to lead a group, he tagged me for that. And I was, I was nervous, I'm not gonna lie, I was extremely nervous because I had so much leadership experience, but I had no management experience. Um, and so it's a little bit different when you're managing people and their careers versus telling a volunteer, hey, you're not pulling your weight, they'll be like, eh, what you gonna do?

Right?

But you tell your employee they're not pulling their weight, that can impact their career and their career trajectory. So, you know, I was really nervous about it, but it turned out that the people that I had been working with, that I was now managing, were so supportive and understanding. And part of that is I'm kind of a transparent open book. And maybe I'm not as professional as I should have been in saying, you know, I'm a little bit nervous about this, guys, I need your help. But everybody wanted to help and everybody wanted to work with me on this. And, you know, I didn't say, well, now that I'm your boss, we're going to do it this way. It was more partnership. So Pete was very, very supportive of that and helping me grow in that. And then moving into the leadership of the department, sitting on the leadership team of the department really gave me a very broad understanding of decisions that had been made prior to my being a leader that sort of. I wasn't privy to the bigger picture. And that was really helpful to learn about that and to Say, okay, now I understand why some of the decisions were made that impacted me because we needed to think about a much broader set of factors in making a decision. So that was, for me, very eye opening and super useful.

You said you were kind of an open book about asking for help. I find that that's another hack. So we're. If we're going to make these life hacks, so we've got networking as a life hack. Volunteering is a life hack.

Yep.

And one thing that people underestimate is the power of asking for help. Because people so much love helping people. And actually the reciprocity of helping and being helped is such a good way to build relationships and to build credibility. You might think that asking for help makes you seem like less of an expert, but actually people look at you as a more credible person in the long run.

Right. Because I think there's a lot of leaders that they don't want people to know that they don't know something. And sometimes you can fake it, but sometimes you can't, but you try, and it actually makes you look less credible because they can see that you are BSing. And I, I'm not interested in doing that. For, for me, my job was to help my people be successful, to give them the resources that they needed, to give them the support they needed. And if that's not something that I felt like I could do or I needed their help in doing that, you know, it. It only made sense for me to say that. And in fact, one of the people that I managed was a very close friend of mine. And I actually asked Pete, could I tell him first before we announce it to the rest of the department? And so I called him and I was so nervous and I said, I need to tell you something. He said, you're going to be our boss, aren't you? And I said, yes. And he said, that's great. And I said, okay, good, good, good. But I said, what I need from you is there's going to be times that we can't talk the same way that we used to when I come to Europe. I can't stay at your apartment anymore. You know, I used to stay in his guest room because he's my best friend. I can't stay in your apartment anymore, and we can't vacation together anymore. At least not while I'm your boss. Now we've gone back to vacationing together because I'm not his boss anymore. I said, I need you to help me be successful and I want to help you, but I need you to help me because I'm nervous about this. And I think when you. When you're honest with people and you say, this is my first time managing people, I want to know what works for you, I want to know how I can help you, they respond very favorably to that. Like you were saying, they want to help, they want to help, and they know that if you're asking them, how can I manage you best, what do you need? My personality is not the same as a lot of people, as you might imagine. In my field, most people are not quite as people oriented as I am. They're not as extroverted. So if I were to lead the way that I need to be led, that would be, let's say, off putting to a lot of people, going to them and saying, help me help you. I think that's very attractive to people because that way they get to forge their own relationship with me in the way that they need it, versus me saying, this is the way that I'm gonna lead you, and if that doesn't work for people, they're gonna leave.

Yeah, that's really insightful. So you recently pivoted completely away from the corporate world and you launched a consulting firm where you're essentially helping people communicate their science better. So tell me a little bit about this pivot. What is your consulting all about? And, you know, what do you love doing with people?

Part of this came from my time, actually, back at Novartis, where I was new in the department and I was a bit lonely. So I was looking to meet people in the company, and I joined Toastmasters because Toastmasters is a club for public speaking and professional skills. But it crossed the company. So I joined to meet people I did not join to be a better communicator. That was a bonus, which is very nice. But I continued to do Toastmasters. The other thing is that Pete, who I mentioned before, has been very passionate about communication skills. He's studied that. He's written a book, how to be a model communicator for people in my field. I've learned a lot at his feet. So because of that and because of his passion for that and my interest in that, even before going to Astellas, I worked a lot with Pete on learning about communication skills, and we did webinars together and we did podcasts together and things. So he. He really nurtured that. That interest of mine. When I became a manager, I realized how important it is for my people's success for them to be good communicators. Because what we do is so niche and so weird to others and sometimes a bit intimidating. Math is often intimidating. And when we go in there and we start talking numbers and putting up tables and putting up these weird graphs and using our lingo, everything's lost. You know, the. The message that you want to impart is you should take forward a dose of 5 and 10 milligrams. Use the two doses to take forward. But when you go in there and you layer that with. And then the theta and the eta, and we use F, O, C, E, I, and here's our VPCs. And people are just like, eh, forget it. We'll come up with the dose on our own. So seeing that in. In my individual career, seeing that from my folks and then working with them to help them, cracked their presentations before they went off to team meetings, made me realize I have a bit of a knack for it. I don't have my red pen in front of me, but I love taking out the red pen and just slashing stuff and, and really spending the time sitting back and going, why is this slide here? Do we need this table? What, what do you want to show them in the table? Oh, just this number. Well, then just show them that number. Like, what does this graph mean? Well, it's obvious. It means this. Okay. It's obvious to me. So it's going to be obvious to a clinician, it's going to be obvious to a pharmacologist. No. And so I. I grew between the Toastmasters, between working with Pete, and between actually seeing such a desperate need for this that when I decided to take a break and just see what it is that I really wanted to do when I grew up, um, I was just like, I wonder if people will pay me to do this. Because, you know, I'd always done this kind of as a hobby. I'd done these webinars and things as a hobby. I'd done trainings and things. But when I rolled this out, and I rolled it out with a video because, you know, I'm a communications expert, I need to make a video. So many people came up to me at a conference that was just following the rollout. I did it specifically before a conference, and they were like, oh, my God, we need this so badly. Oh, thank you for doing this. Nobody else is doing this. So, you know, that was very heartening. But at the same time, a close friend of mine, who is, in addition to being an amazing statistician, is also a musician, said, well, lots of people told me how great it was that I made an album. And he's like, but not a lot of people bought my album, so I hope people will buy your album. And so far, people have been buying my album, which is quite exciting. But people really see the need for this, and they're making space for this now in their budgets. They're making space for this now in their training plans. And I'm hoping this becomes a very regular thing for a lot of the people in pharmacometrics and beyond.

Yeah, that's amazing. Let's talk about presentations in different contexts, because it sounds like that context was, you know, the conference context, which is a specific context. A lot of folks in our community are worried about job talks, which is a place that people really struggle and, you know, we don't, knock on wood, usually have to apply for a lot of jobs. So it can be years between giving a job talk, and so then you're very rusty at it. So job talks have a very specific purpose and a very specific, specific audience. What makes them different from, let's say, a conference presentation?

Totally different. They're totally different. First of all, when you do a conference presentation, it's about the topic, it's about the science, it's about the cool method or the cool discovery that you've made. That is not what a job talk is about. The job talk is about how you present yourself, talking about the science. I've always told people, if you have the choice between a very sexy scientific presentation where you did this much, or kind of a more. I won't say mundane, but a more sort of typical presentation, but you've done this much and you've had an impact. Present that one, because we're looking to see what you bring to the table. So whereas the conference presentation is about the science, the job presentation's about you. It's about you, it's about what you did, it's about your understanding of the science, but it's also about how you present this to people who don't know this work. I would say there's many other things about a job presentation. First of all, they're short and you will be interrupted. Whereas in a conference presentation, you're likely to go through the entire presentation and then you have five minutes of Q and A at the end. I have seen job presentations where they get 15 minutes in and the rest of the time is discussion. And they're looking to see whether you can handle that. Nobody is specifically interrupting you to see how you handle interruptions. But if you can't handle it, if you start to get stressed out, if you start to say, oh, well, I need to finish this presentation. No, you don't. You don't need to finish it. If the conversation is happening and people are in the group, that means they're interested and they want to talk to you and they want to hear from you. So we're also looking to see, how do you answer questions? How do you handle a question that you don't have the answer to? Because you won't have the answer to all the questions when you're working, Right. So how do you handle that? It's a little bit like your PhD defense, which I'm assuming many people have gone through. So when you're doing your PhD defense, you won't know the answer to all the questions that they're going to throw at you, but you have to show them that you have the capability of figuring out how to answer that question. What are the resources you might go to? Who are the people you might talk to? How do you bring your science and your understanding together to be able to approach a question on something that you don't know? Because when you're going to a job, there's going to be a lot of new stuff that you don't know. So we're really for a job talk. We're looking for your ability to handle the questions. We're looking for your ability to represent the work that you did. A lot of times when you go to a conference presentation, you say, we, we did this, we did this. And you should still say, we did this if it is a group effort. But talk about the stuff that I did, talk about the stuff that you did. Because we're looking to see what are the capabilities that you're bringing to the table. And it should be any presentation, not just. Not just a job talk. Polished. It should be proofread. It should be consistent and clean. And it should be something that you can answer questions about. I've seen a lot of job talks where it's like, well, I don't know. This is work I did 15 years ago. Now, sometimes that's out of your hands. Sometimes you can't present work that you had done, you know, in your previous job. But if it is something that you presented a long time ago, go back and do your due diligence. Go look up the information. Because if you're going to be presenting that, you have to be prepared to answer questions about it. I always say that for a job talk, make it modular, so have pieces that you can skip over without A problem because again, if you're interrupted, the thing that you don't want to see at the end as an audience member is somebody panicking and then speeding through all the rest of their slides because they need to get to the end. So there needs to be pieces of that that you can take out or skip through without kind of losing the entire thread. Most of your stuff should be in the backups so that you are prepared to answer questions, but less is more focus in on the impact of what you did, the strategy, not just sort of the nuts and bolts of the presentation. So a lot of these things are different than a conference presentation, which is sort of flashy. And look at me, look at this cool work. This is about how you handle a scientific dialogue, how you handle interruptions, how you handle questions. They're looking at you. They're trying to get a feel for who you are to work with and how you communicate your scientific results.

That is a great overview. I want to double click on a couple of things you said just to really underscore. I'm putting my recruiter hat on right now. I'm telling you. You know, Stacy, we'd love to have you in for a presentation next week. I always try and prepare my candidates for what this particular group is like. Rely on your recruiter, ask the questions, ask. In a typical job talk presentation, you know, what does that look like? At Company xyz, I have some companies where I tell candidates, you know what, prepare three 10 minute vignettes, little stories and expect to get through one, because that's how many questions we're going to ask. And so that's to your point, the modular nature, like if you don't time for the other two. Because we really had a good time chatting about number one, that's okay, that's okay. That job talk was a success. But I have some groups that are very studious and they will reserve all questions to the last 15 minutes. That is the expectation. And so I can prepare candidates that way too. The other thing that I really heard from your answer that I want to double click on is the ability to field questions you don't know. Expect that and don't feel like a failure when you don't know a question. We are trying to probe the edges of your understanding and how you would handle the ambiguity.

Right. I tell students in particular or junior scientists, we know you don't know everything and it's okay. I would rather somebody say, you know what? I don't know the answer to that, but here's how I might go about figuring it out. And let me get back to you on that. I like that as an answer better than somebody trying to bumble their way through it or BS again, their way through it. The other thing that I've neglected to mention is sometimes if you go to a conference, if I go to, for example, a pharmacometrics conference, I can be fairly confident it could be pharmacometricians in the audience. So I can say things and use lingo that they're going to understand. So ask your recruiter or the hiring manager who's going to be in the audience because sometimes it's just your department, but sometimes it's also partner functions. And so if I had somebody come in for a pharmacometrics role, but I invited statisticians and clinicians and pharmacologists, if this person does a super uber technical presentation, those guides are going to get lost. So it's always important to know who's going to be in the audience and sort of what is their understanding of the background. Because you may want to step back and make sure you have a little bit of a background slide or something like that. Still you want to focus more on the target, you know, more on the pharmacometricians in my case. But keep in mind, if there's other people in the audience, if you make it so technical, you're going to lose them. And also I need to see how you can present to people who aren't us. So coming back to kind of the whole purpose of what I'm doing now is that's not something that is generally a forte of people who are very, very technical.

That makes perfect sense. That's a really good point. When I'm thinking about a student or a candidate, I'd say student too. So going to your thesis defense is sort of the same, but your job talk, you can leave room for the technical details to be discussed in either the Q and A or your one to ones. Because remember, we're typically going to have more conversations with you. And the nice thing about a job talk, you can think of it as a way to set yourself up for questions you really want to talk about and answer in those one to ones for those super technical people. So you can say, hey, we, we really had to troubleshoot this assay. I'd love to talk about that. I don't have time in this presentation, but ask me about that troubleshooting because we found some really stuff. So you can kind of seed these questions that you actually want to Talk about through that presentation. I love that technique.

Yeah. I ask, I would always ask if there's hiring managers here that are listening. Try to plan that as early in the day as possible because sometimes if it's at the end of the day, you don't have time to do that. And. But as a candidate, I've loved it when a question has come up in, in the presentation and then at the end of the day and then I get an email from them, it's like, you know what? I was thinking about this because it's showing that not only is like, okay, the interview is over, the door is closed, but they're still thinking about it. And they're like, you know, I wanted to get back to you on this and that that for me is a, is a positive because it means that it wasn't just like, okay, I've checked this box, I've done this presentation. Like, I've really thought about what that question was. I really appreciate that when, when people follow up after that. So if you can't do it in your one on one, then it's. I think it's great to, to follow up.

We could go on and on about job talks and I think that we probably will at some point because I think we're gearing up to have a module that you teach about job talks, which is going to be really great. Let's talk about some common presentation mistakes because we, yeah, we had fun talking about this when we met up before. So I sit through a lot of bad presentations during interviews and they are make or break. We have dismissed candidates that are not going to make the cut because they really lost us in the presentation. So what are you seeing as the most common mistakes in scientific presentation?

I find this a lot, particularly with junior modelers. And you ask them what was your objective? And they said, my objective was to build a model. It's like, no, it wasn't. Your objective was to solve a problem. So people often forget that there's a reason that you're doing the science that you're doing. And so if you start with, my objective was to do the science. Okay, so you've done the science. So what? So a lot of people forget the so what. They forget the what's in it for me? I. E. What's in it for you? I would say, as the audience, tell them why this is interesting, tell them a story. So this is not so much the mistake, it's almost like the flip side of that, which is I am going to recommend 10 and 15 milligrams now, I'm going to tell you how I got there, but I wanted to give this to you up front. I wanted to tell you this because if you fall asleep during my presentation, or you gotta go, or we run out of time, you know the answer. So your presentation is not a murder mystery. A lot of people make their presentation a murder mystery, and they reveal the answer at the very, very end. But if you need to get this important point across, you put that stuff up front, you get that out there. Because especially if you're presenting to decision makers, you might come in thinking you have 15 minutes and the agenda's running long, and you have three minutes. You got to get to the point waiting until the end to tell them, so what is a big mistake? So flip side, tell them. Tell them at the beginning. Dryness, like a scientific presentation, a technical presentation does not have to be boring. Now, a lot of people freak out when I say that because, you know, I'm not saying you have to go in with a jester's hat and you have to have, like, animations and things like that, but it's okay for you to have energy. It's okay for you to be excited about what you're presenting. But going in there with the monotone voice and reading your slides. Don't read your slides. Please don't read your slides. Please don't read your slides. But going there, reading your slides, you know, being monotone, that's a no go. Put a little bit of energy into it. If you're nervous, here's a tip. I'm nervous. When I give presentations, I push it out as enthusiasm. Now, I'm not saying, you know, you gotta be up there doing this, but I push forward my nervousness as enthusiasm. And if you're not excited about what you're presenting, neither will your audience be. Your audience will be bored. If you're bored, they're bored. So be excited about what you're presenting.

When you say to give them the answer and not make it a murder mystery. I just want everyone listening to this to hear that I give the same advice when you're answering your interview questions. Answer the question, then tell the story. So everyone gets very hung up on their star stories. If it's, do you have experience with xyz? Yes, for example. So I. That's the very same thing. Yeah, don't bury the lead. Like, just get it out there. And if you've heard anything from me on Zoom interviews and things like that, like, Zoom steals energy from you. You have to be more animated than you think you need to be if you're giving a presentation on Zoom, Yes. In real life, it's a little bit easier because they can see your whole body. And so I love your advice for pushing out that nervousness into enthusiasm.

Right.

Actually walking around and moving around and not like, clutching your podium and being stuck behind the podium. The audience interprets that as enthusiasm, but you can just burn off your nervous energy that way.

Right.

On Zoom, you're kind of stuck. You got to sit here and give your presentation. And so sometimes to make hand gestures, you have to bring your hands up. They can't see them down. And this translates into a better audience experience is just, you have to. You have to inject the energy. They're not going to do it. You have to do it.

Absolutely. And, you know, the other thing was, when you're in person is you can make eye contact. You know, you can look at one person and talk to them, and then when you go to your next point, you can look at another person and talk to them. Here I'm not even looking at you, right. I'm looking at my camera right now. If I'm looking at you, I'm not making eye contact. So. So Zoom is very awkward for that kind of thing. And you're right, you can stand up. And when we did online Toastmaster during the pandemic, we had people stand up, but it feels very awkward to just be standing in your office moving around. I happen to talk with my hands. I move my head a lot. I blink my eyes a lot. I noticed that when I watch these videos, like, oh, my God, I move so much. But you're right, it does add some zest to it. One of the things that killed me during the pandemic is because so many conferences went online, they recorded presentations. And I will tell you that me recording a presentation, it's like, hello, I am recording a presentation. I am clearly reading a script right now. It's so boring. Whereas if I'm talking, I'm just like, hey, I'm recording a presentation. I'm reading a script right now. It's so, so different. And so if you do have an online presentation or you have to record it, I recommend have a friend online record it in front of people. I had to record a presentation for a training course I was giving, so I invited my colleagues to come, and I even said, you know, I've got some colleagues that are here. They're off camera. But I'm doing this so that I am speaking to an audience. Because everything changes when you know you are being looked at by the camera and you get. I get very stiff, and I'm not a stiff presenter at all. Try to listen up a little bit. Try to, you know, use your hands. Don't have something in your hand and you're talking. You know, small things like that I think are, are important for distractions.

How about dense slides? So how much stuff should be on a slide?

Not much. My presentations tend to be almost just pictures. I, I have very little text on the slide. Sometimes you need text. The very important thing is if you do have a lot of density on a slide and you need to, for whatever reason, build it. So don't put it all out there at once. Because people can either listen to you or look at your slide. They cannot do both. So unless you're reading, which you shouldn't do, so that everything is aligned, people are going to look at one or the other. One of the coolest tricks I ever learned was from also somebody who presented at AAPS, David Odie, which is when you have a, a PowerPoint presentation up, if you want people to look at you, you hit the B button or the W and it blacks the slide or it points the slide. So it basically just, just converts your slide into a black slide. Now it freaks people out, which is good because they'll be looking and then all of a sudden your content goes away and you're like, hey, wake up, look at me. So it actually really does get people sort of awake, but it also makes them look at you. So if you need them to hear you and you need them to pay attention to you and not be looking at your slide, that's a very cool trick. So thank you, David Odie, for that. But if you need to use the content on your slide, build it gradually. Use animation. And I don't mean things flying in and out, but I mean, if you have to show a table, for example, but you want to show one particular thing while you're talking about it, put a box around it. I'm not a fan of using the pointer. The reason for that is people have pointer reviews. You know, they, they tend to do this and they're underlining every word that they're doing. So I'm not a fan of the pointer or even use of the mouse. I much prefer that you have the pointer stuff already sort of prepared by putting a box around something or a build around something. Use it judiciously in terms of, of builds. But builds are super useful. And if you have a Dense slide, but ideally you do not have a dent slide. PowerPoint slides are a renewable resource. They are free. You can have as many slides as you want. And I know people say, oh, be careful. You don't want to have more slides than you have minutes. I mean, if you have a build, that's okay. I would prefer to break up your content. Even if you spend 10 seconds on a slide, just make that the focus of your presentation and then move to the next slide as opposed to trying to cram everything into one.

I am with you to your point earlier. They're either going to be listening to you or reading your slide. And we scientists, I like a good graph. Like, if you're going to put up a graph, I'm instantly going to tune out you and I'm going to be like, what's this graph all about? And I'm going to be graph. I'm going to be reading the axes, I'm going to be trying to figure out, are these error bars good, bad?

What's, you know, is that the standard error, the standard distribution? What is that?

My brain is gone from you?

Yes, yes. If you are going to use a figure, you have to be able to parse it easily. People fall in love with these really complicated figures and they're great for papers, they're great for when you have the time to break it down. But for a presentation, it's not going to be up there that long. So if you are going to use a figure, make sure that that figure is really quick and easy to parse. And, and put the take home message on your slide. If you have a figure on there, you want them to be able to say, okay, this figure is showing that we need to take forward 5 and 10 milligrams because the 15 milligram dose is going to take us above the therapeutic window or whatever, whatever it is, you put that in the title or you put that in a big box on the slide. Because I find a lot of times people will put a slide that it makes sense when you're in the room with them and they are breaking it down for you. But as soon as you walk away, that slide still exists and that slide is out of your hands once you have given that to somebody else. So I have seen people take slides that have been presented by me. I've made this mistake before where I didn't have the take home message on it. And they're like, oh, I presented your slides to the chief medical officer and here's what I said. It's like that is not what that graph is saying, but that's on me because I didn't annotate my slide properly and I did not put the take home message on there. So that's one thing to remember. Just in general, especially if you're working kind of in teams and you're giving your slides as pre reads, be prepared for those slides to have a life outside of you. And so knowing that that's going to happen, make sure that those slides stand alone and they don't need you there. You are a supplement to your slides in that case. Generally I say your slides are supplement to you when you're giving a presentation. But in a case like that where there's this is content that needs to be sort of propagated to other people, you're a supplement to your slides. So make sure that that slide set stands by itself.

Interesting. That's a really, really interesting perspective and not something I think that has been made. Yeah, yeah, that's a lived mistake. That's like, oh, now I know. So that's old. Um, you just talked about titles. Slide titles. Slide titles drive me absolutely crazy on most people's presentations because they don't say anything. So tell us about a good slide title. Like what should it look like?

Right, it, it should be your take home message. Ideally we call them declarative titles. If you can put your take home message in the title then that is explaining what's on the slide. So the says, you know the, the doses. I keep coming back to that because it's an easy one. Like the, the doses we recommend are 5 and 10 milligrams. That is the, the take home message on the slide. And then you show that in the figure. You showed that in the text or whatever as you need to do. If you just have a slide title that says like pharmacokinetics, you know, so, so what background so that you don't have to have a title either. I think that's something that people kind of get nervous about. If you just have a graph or you just have something, you don't need a title. Or if you have just content that sort of speaks for itself, you don't need a title. So that's something that is open. I give you permission to not have a title as long as your take home message is the content there. Um, I'm trying to think of like what is a good title. I, I can show that. I guess maybe when we go into the, the trainings I'll have some examples of, of those kind of Titles for you.

Yeah. I mean, your dosing example is perfect. I. The titles that I see in job talks are exactly what you were saying, like background troubleshooting. And it's like if I. If I get an email, which happens, I'm. I'm listening to your presentation. I'm so studious, and then something comes into my inbox that I actually need to address for two seconds.

Yeah.

And then I come back and you've moved on to your next slide, and I've missed half of what you said. Your audience has to catch up. They have to be able to go, oh, okay, that's what we're talking about. There's a lot to learn. The thing is, we don't spend enough time on this when really at any stage in our career, but definitely not during our PhD process. We're giving, frankly, usually pretty bad talks. I was lucky. I had a PI that really valued giving good talks, and I was rewarded by being invited to several international conferences to give talks. And that's pretty rare because most. Most talks are not very good. They're too dense. But even so, then I paid for speaker training, and most people don't have that benefit. And so we want to give them as much information as we can. And, you know, hopefully it's not overwhelming, but you can always come into the community. Stacy's in there, right? Ask Stacy questions, and then we're gonna put this into more of a standardized format you can learn from. But I do have some great lightning round questions for you.

Okay, I'm ready.

Love a good lightning round. Okay, so what is the best presentation advice you ever received?

Talk slower. I talk fast and a lot, as you've noticed. Talk slower. Breathe.

Ooh, breathe. That's a good one, right? What is the worst presentation advice you ever got?

More technical stuff. You didn't do enough technical stuff. Honestly, I totally disagree with that. Yeah, it's just the right amount.

What is one tool or resource you really like right now for making slides?

Honestly, I'm a PowerPoint girl, which I think a lot of people kind of Poo Poo PowerPoint. They like all those fancy ones. I like PowerPoint. Learn how to use it. It's. It's got incredible functionality, but learn how to use things like animation and, you know, embedding videos and things like that, because it really is. It's very powerful. If you don't know how to do something, Google it and you'll find a YouTube video on. On how to use some of these really great functionality of PowerPoint. PowerPoint works, works for a reason.

I basically live on YouTube. I feel like anything I need to do, it's just, it's there, it's so useful. And I do a lot of YouTube videos for career, you know, so I'm just like paying it forward there. But you can learn anything, anything, anything. What is an example of a great presenter that you love in the scientific space? Who should we check out?

God, there's so many in my field, but I, you know, I'm going to give Pete a shout out again. So Pete Peter Bonet. B O N A T E. And he's written a book. He's written several books, but one is how to Be a Model Communicator, where he gets all kinds of awesome tips and tricks for technical presenters, not just for pharmacometricians, including understanding your audience, including preparing your presentation, practicing and things like that. So I want to give a shout out to Pete. He's a great presenter and I so enjoy doing presentations with him. I'll pop a couple of our webinars into the show notes so people can go and check them out.

Final words for someone who's nervous about an upcoming talk, whether it's a job talk or otherwise.

First of all, you are the expert in your content and I think people forget that, especially if you're doing a job talk. You're the expert, you know the most about the content that you're going to be presenting. So don't worry so much because yes, people might know some about the science and they might know some about the methodology, but you are the expert in the total picture and you are in control. Second, if you forget something, nobody knows but you. So don't beat yourself up. I think people, oh God, I wanted to talk about this and I forgot it and now I've ruined the entire presentation. Nobody knows. Only you know. So give yourself some grace. Practice, practice, practice. And it. It. That's probably the, the biggest piece of advice. Practice, record yourself, get on zoom, practice your presentation, listen to it, write it out, script it, practice it until you're so bored of it you never want to listen to it again. And I would say my biggest piece of advice for presentations, memorize the first 30 seconds. Because sometimes that's what you need to get over the hump for. The people who get up there and they are so scared. If you know the first 30 seconds once you start that, you're fine. So memorize those first 30 seconds until you can say it backwards, forwards, in the shower, in the car, in bed, wherever. And then when you get up there, let that first 30 seconds out, and the rest of it will. Will flow from there. But that's all about practicing. Practicing and preparing. And the more important, the more you should practice.

Yes. And practicing out loud, like you said, recording it. I used to practice things in my head. I remember preparing presentations and earlier in my career and. And thinking that it was sufficient to be going through it in your head, but then you open your mouth and it comes out all different.

So. Right.

It's gotta be out loud. And if you can, you know, rope a friend into listening to you, return the favor.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Practice it in front of other people as well as by yourself. But I have recorded every presentation. And the last presentation that I gave, I actually recorded. I put the audio on my phone and I went for a walk and I listened to the audio and I'm like, okay, I don't like that. I want to change that piece. So really, you know, the more experienced that you are, you think that you don't have to practice. But I. I beg to differ. I practice for everything that I do. Everything. And I'd say the other thing is, you can call me. This is something that I do is I help people prepare for presentations. And I've helped a lot for interview presentations. And. And what I've been told by my clients is that it's been very helpful. And one person started bringing out code. They started taking people, and I was like, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. To do the live. Live demos and things like that. So there's, you know, just having another person going. He may not want to do that. Get a sanity check from. From a second person, for sure.

Well, we will put all of your information in the show notes and you're in the community so people can come in and ask for help in there and, you know, get hooked up with you for a session or whatever they need. And. Yeah, and then we'll. We'll get a course put together because I think this is so important and I'm just so excited to know you and have this resource. And everybody should reach out to Stacy because she's fantastic and presentations are everything. You will make more money in your career. But hands down, if you're a good presenter, there will be more money in your future. You will get more promotions, more jobs, all of the things.

Absolutely. And I've said the same thing for you, Karina. I've. I introduced you to everybody because after I saw you do a webinar for aaps, and then I I sought you out at, at A, at AAPS. At the, the meeting, I was like, all of the young people I know that are looking for jobs and like, you gotta go over to this.

Oh, thank you. Yeah.

No, it's great advice.

Well, this was wonderful. Thank you so, so much for your time. And we will see you in the community. We're going to have a Q and A. People can come in and we'll have 30 minutes with Stacy just to talk through some of this stuff. So that'll be really love to me. Awesome.

Well, thank you all so much for having me. It's great. And, and, you know, good luck, everybody on your interviews. You could do it. I trust you.

Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach podcast by the collaboratory Career Hub. Join our school community to get access to support resources and materials. And be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. Pro tip. When you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. Have an amazing week and we'll see you back here next Friday.