Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

Your Defense Slides Don't Need to be Pretty

17 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief advisory segment, the presenter warns graduate students and researchers against spending excessive time on decorative or "cute" slides for their thesis or dissertation defenses. He emphasizes that committee members are primarily interested in solid data, rigorous analysis, and clear results, not in aesthetic embellishments. The speaker advises focusing effort on strengthening the substantive content of the presentation rather than searching for perfect images, as visual flair cannot compensate for weak data or analysis.

Chapters

What a lot of people spend a lot of time on is what I'm just going to call cute slides, you know, 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. 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