From not bad to next level (a BOSS case study)
Many people fear public speaking and avoid presentations whenever they can. Thankfully, I’m not one of them.
I actually enjoy giving talks, unless I’m being recorded or evaluated. One of my magic powers is a projecting voice and dynamic speaking style. I also know my topic well enough to just talk about it without using my slides as a crutch. It makes it easier to engage with my audience.
And I thought I was pretty good at this “slide-making” stuff.
I first came across BOSS while procrastinating on Twitter early last term. Echo Rivera’s viral tweet about laptop use in the classroom caught my eye. As a graduate student and teaching assistant, I was curious about her perspective. It’s disheartening to see students using their laptops for Facebook instead of lecture notes. But Echo’s point about designing an engaging presentation—instead of banning laptops—hit home for me.
I took the Stellar Slides in 5 intro course and was convinced. I’m in psychology too. I’m an academic. And Echo seemed genuine. I’m already using multimedia formats in my presentations. For lectures to undergraduate students, I like to show short videos illustrating the topic, and use activities to break up me just talking. I like to use humour and geeky references to engage my audience. But my slides still had clutter.
They’re not awful—I’ve seen worse. But they had still too much text, irrelevant formatting from templates, and poorly placed images. While I got compliments on my first guest lecture two years ago from students, I knew I could do better. I’ve seen some cringe-worthy slides even at talks given by established academics. The slides were essentially lecture notes splashed onto a template.
I wanted to give my presentations a wow factor. As a graduate student, I give a fair number of talks. Brown bag talks in front of fellow graduate students. Tutorials as part of teaching assistant duties. Guest lectures in other courses. Presentations to the public as part of research dissemination. And eventually, I’ll be giving a dissertation defense and then (hopefully!) job talks.
So I decided to up for BOSS.
Jump back to October. I was a marking TA in a Research in Personality class. I wasn’t running any tutorials, but wanted practice teaching students, so I offered to give some guest lectures. The prof thought it was a great idea.
Keep in mind that at this time, I’d only seen a week of BOSS content. At the time, the other modules hadn’t been released yet. But I incorporated what I had learned into my slide creation.
Seventeen students were in this class. After, four of them (almost 25%!) came up to me on the way out and said how much they loved it. The visuals, the humour, the Star Wars references—something resonated with them. My course supervisor also loved it. “I wish I was teaching this course full time,” she said. “I’d love to have you come in again for another guest lecture.”
After, I showed one of my colleagues my slide deck. He was impressed.
“How long did it take you?” he asked.
“For the slides or the whole lecture?”
“Either. Both.”
“For the slides, three hours. For the content, seven hours.” This was for a two-hour lecture.
“Wow!” he said. “They look like it took a lot longer. These slides are next level—you can use these forever.”
He calls me the “Queen of Powerpoints” now.
I’m doing my first symposium talk in May (eek!), and you bet I’ll be using what I learned from BOSS!
Bio: Laura Johnson is a PhD student in Psychology at Western University (Personality and Measurement). Her research interests include prosocial personality traits (e.g., compassion), antisocial personality traits (e.g., narcissism), and test construction.
