In this instructional talk, the speaker outlines how doctoral candidates should construct their dissertation defense slide deck to retain control of the presentation and meet committee expectations. The core advice emphasizes using concise bullet points rather than dense paragraphs, because audiences read slides faster than the presenter speaks, leading to loss of attention if slides are text‑heavy. The presenter lists the essential content that must appear: a reminder of the research problem, purpose, questions, methodology (with enough detail for replication), key results, their meaning, limitations, and future directions. Administrative details such as correctly spelling committee members’ names and titles, and providing a clear outline of the defense flow, are highlighted as simple yet critical. Time management is stressed—candidates should limit slide count to fit the allotted minutes and rehearse through multiple mock defenses to ensure smooth delivery. The talk warns against “cute” decorative slides that add no substantive value and against over‑loading the deck with unnecessary material. Finally, the speaker encourages candidates to practice reading their slides naturally and offers further support through Beyond PhD Coaching.
Chapters
So when it comes to defense, what type of slides should I have in my defense? Or what type of slides does my committee want or not want? Remember, in your defense, your committee's already read your dissertation more likely than not more than once. So they know what's in there. They're looking for you to highlight your findings. They're looking for you to highlight what it means, how it fits in with the literature. And they're looking for you to do it within the guidelines of what your institution wants because many times an institution will have just a PowerPoint deck of slides that you, okay, use these, put your stuff in it. So, you know, a lot of times that's defined as to what you're going to have in the slides or what the slides are going to be. So, you have to fill it in from there. I want you to remember that when you're talking and you're showing slides, people read faster and than you talk. So if you end up putting a lot of words on your slides, paragraphs, things like that, they're intent on reading them. They're not listening to you. And they're done reading them before you're done talking about them. And this is when chaos can ensue in a dissertation defense because you, in effect, have lost control. And if they're sitting at home or in their office and you're somewhere else on a Zoom call, And you're reading these things and they've already finished. They're on the web. They're searching for tickets for their next vacation or what movies are playing, or they're doing something. And then they're coming back and their attention has been on and off, now back on. And this is when we get weird and wacky questions that you may have already covered or they've developed based on whatever they're doing. So I'm a believer that your PowerPoint should be bullet points. That have guidelines for you to move forward. Also, bullet points— if you get off track, it's a lot easier to find out where you were by looking back at bullet points than it is to 3 paragraphs of words on a slide. Ultimately, they want to see what are your results, what does it mean, what limitations are there, because this isn't going to answer everything, and what else should be done. And this is in your final defense. Those are the important things they are looking for on this. I would include in a final defense, though, reminder slides. I am going to call them, hey, this was the problem we were looking at and the purpose, and these were the research questions to keep everybody on track. And I used a qualitative methodology or a quantitative methodology. And then, okay, I interviewed the people, I transcribed, Or I found the data, I cleaned the data, I used this test, etc. And, you know, what steps did you do? Because sometimes things don't work exactly as you expect. So, okay, I want to know what you did to find— get the— in a quantitative study to normalize the data so you could use this specific test. And then you have to be able to explain and tell them, oh, I did the log of the certain variable or something. And that allowed normality to be an assumption that was met. Or it turns out my data didn't meet the assumptions and I couldn't use this test, which is why I used this other test, which is more powerful. And that shows that you have facility with the research process. So that's what they want to see in the defense. What a lot of people spend a lot of time on is what I'm just going to call cute slides. With a nice picture or maybe a graphic. You know, a lot of times committees really don't care a lot about that. They want to know, okay, let's do this and be done. I got other things to do with my day. Yeah, okay, cool, great, nice picture, but tell me. Because pictures aren't going to make up for lacking data or poor analysis or anything else. But good analysis is what they want to see. So you want that there. Don't just spend hours and hours and hours trying to search for the right picture to go in there. It's not going to sway a committee one way or another. One of the biggest mistakes I see with slides is, well, several of the mistakes. Too many slides. People haven't gone through this ahead of time. When a committee says you've got 20 minutes or you've got 30 minutes or whatever the time period is, and let's say you've got 30 minutes to do this and you're at minute 42, they're not happy. They have lives that they plan. So they want you to be responsible and do that. So you need to go through this multiple times so that you're comfortable with it and you can meet the timeframe that is involved. They want to know that a slide has meaning. Don't just put a slide in there for the heck of it. Oh, here's a nice picture or here's a graph. Okay, if I'm going to put it in there, It better be important and move my story forward. So make sure everything that's included, because look, you got lots of pages in your dissertation. You're not putting them all in your slide. You're hitting the major points. You can always refer back to things from your dissertation. Oh yeah, that's from so-and-so, or we did this, we did whatever it was. I did this test and this is why this statistical test Is now important, or I collected data and here's, you know, the data collection and you now explain it more. Having bullet points allows you to explain more. So putting too much on a slide is a big mistake I've seen. When you're on your proposal defense, your methodology slide is bullet points of your methodology. Your methodology is the process That you're going to go through, but you also want to remember your committee thinks, can someone replicate this? So that means your methodology has to be sufficiently explained so that others can replicate it if they ever want to redo your study. If it can't be replicated, how do we know you did it right? How can anybody check on this? Or was it just magic? And we don't want to deal In magic, there was a poster I saw once, and this has nothing to do with religion or anything— well, maybe a little— but this is why God couldn't get tenure. And one of the points was because his work couldn't be replicated. Well, we want people to know they could replicate your work if they want to try to do it elsewhere. I guess the final point I want to make is I look at a lot of slide decks of defenses. Before people submit them. And some of the things that I see— first, the title page. Make sure you spell your committee's names right. Make sure you have their titles right. Technically, if someone has a PhD or an Ed.D., they are either Dr. Jones or Sally Jones, PhD, or Sally Jones, Ed.D. It's not both. Technically, that means you have 2 degrees. So you want to make sure. And I've seen a lot of people list Sally Jones, PhD, when Sally Jones has an Ed.D. or vice versa. So you want to get that right because it gets people on your side if it's right or not, or against you if it's wrong. You want to typically have some sort of outline of what's going to happen. Okay. The biggest mistake though I see is too many slides. Hey, I've got 20 minutes and here's 42 slides. Because they feel they've got to include all kinds of stuff and everything, and they're not going to finish in 20 minutes with 42 slides. I guess that next, the biggest mistake should fall to they haven't prepared. They haven't gone through it ahead of time. They haven't done a mock or multiple mock defenses where they just try to go through their slides. If you're just doing it the first time, your committee knows. And if you're Just reading it. It's okay to read, but read it like you've read it before instead of reading it like, uh, uh, uh, and getting stumped on words and things like that. That can— some people can think that's a measure of disrespect. If you're prepared though, more often than not, they're happy. I want to wish you good luck on this process. I know you can do this. And if we at Beyond PhD Coaching can ever help you, please reach out to us.
