Information for MSc Students Regarding Project Presentations - June 2012

The presentation
The presentations are of 13 minutes durations. The chairman will indicate when you are about to enter the last minute of your presentation. If you try to extend the presentation beyond the permitted 13 minutes the chairman will guillotine the presentation, irrespective of whether or not you have completed.

Quizzing by Assessor & Supervisor

Time allocated for asking questions is 7 minutes. The Assessor will start the questioning process and then be joined by supervisor. The chairman will guillotine the process after the allocated time has passed.

Associated Credits
The interim report (which hopefully you have had the feedback) is considered to be worth 7 credit points. There are 8 credit points for the MSc presentation. Hence interim report & presentation have a total value of one quarter of the credits (15/60) i.e. there are 45 credit points for final MSc dissertation.

Preparing for the Presentation

In the note I prepared for you regarding the Interim Report I wrote: Hopefully most of you are seeing your project supervisor / mentor on a weekly basis and hence are already in discussion with what needs to be done, what is achievable, what resources are required to complete each subordinate task and how quickly you will need to generate drawings if there is workshop related constructions to complete in readiness for use of selected test facility. The feedback on the Interim Report may have indicated weaknesses in the overall strategy or some specific shortcoming in a selected approach of the investigation. Hence since the reporting task there will have been some refinement of your programme through the selected tasks and subtasks, with either expansion or limitations imposed on work content to ensure the project is tangible, realistic and of an appropriate academic level, hopefully, with the opportunity for you to show off your academic strengths. Furthermore, I wrote: you will need to sort out your project aims and objectives, with some idea of deliverables and timescale and identify essential milestones that need to be reach within an appropriate time scale for the project to complete on time and within budget. Clearly this requires you to identify the

principal underpinning concepts, analyse or measurement methods associated with your project and indicate the extent to which you will be using or extending the concepts addressed. Then there is your current review of literature read and a clear indication of how the literature provides an appropriate support or at least some indication of your planned theoretical analysis or design of the experimental programme to be undertaken. All this is rationally supported by appropriate Gantt chart, figures, drawings, sketches of what might be involved or necessary et cetera. All these comments equally apply to the presentation, except now the bones of the ideas should have a little more flesh on them. Certain subtasks will have been started or been completed and your planned and achieved progress should be a little clearer, with clearer Gantt chart. Clearly time limitations imply a limited number of slides in your PowerPoint presentation. Apart from a Title slide you cannot have more than 8 other slides, assuming your intended dialogue to accompany a slide is not going to exceed one and a half minutes on average. If a slide requires more time to address it fully and meaningfully, then you must reduce the total number of slides accordingly. The final number of slides used should introduce the specific project; indicate your preferred approach with some justification of decisions made and why some approaches may have been rejected, provide an indication of current status of progress and a summarise anticipated deliverables as part of the closure.

Presentation Attendance
Please arrive a few minutes before the allotted presentation time with your presentation on a memory stick. Providing the chairman, supervisor and assessor with a paper copy might help then make relevant notes or questions about your presentation on the relevant slide. Hence with confidence they may raise a point and be confident that it related to a specific portion of the indicated slide i.e. there is clear communication both ways. This is a suggestion.

Prof Grant E. Hearn MES MSc Coordinator

30th May 2012