Learning how to give presentations and write scientific papers

5 Minute Talks

The students hear presentations by and meet with potential mentors on the first days of the summer program. After pairing with a mentor the students then give a very brief oral presentation of what they think the project is about. This is done on the regular monday morning meeting.

10 Minute Talks

Halfway through, the students presented the progress so far in 10 minute talks. These talks were given at Jefferson Lab (to present a more formal setting and to allow proximity to Hampton University). These talks are modeled on APS meeting talks, the students used transparencies and worked with their mentors to produce professional talks. Before the talks abstracts were prepared. These were also of the same form as the APS abstracts and for many of the participants were very nicely done.

30 Minute Talks

At the end of the program 30 minute talks were given by the participants. These described the research done over the summer, put it in context, and made suggestions for future work. Based on these talks two prizes for best presentation were awarded. One chosen by the students was to Ms. Van Tassel for her work on sound wave analysis. The other prizewinner, chosen by the director, was Chad Weiler for his presentation of the beautiful work on ultrafast studies using the magnetooptical Kerr effect.

Final Papers

These were to be in the form of a journal paper, having an abstract(see the abstracts section of this progress report), a main body which put the work in context, described what had been done and as in the talks suggested future work. Most of these papers were very well done.

During the summer the mentors were encouraged to help the students improve their presentation skills. This improvement was striking.