Starting in your third year, you will be expecting to present once an academic year to the students of the Bioinformatics program. As an audience member, you will have the opportunity to provide anonymous feedback to the presenter, and receive that feedback on your own presentation. We offer this page as a review on the expectations for your presentation and the types of feedback you should be giving to the other students in the program.

Purposes of Student Seminar

• To gather as a Bioinformatics community and share our research.
• Presenters can use their seminar as a milestone to formalize thoughts around their research progress, an opportunity to practice communicating results, and an opportunity to solicit feedback.
• Audience members get to learn about their peers’ research and practice providing constructive feedback.
• We all get to spend time with each other and further develop our community.

Expectations for Content

Presentation of research ideas, plans, methods, results, interpretation.

Expectations for Style

Students can present their research in any style ranging from casual to formal. We will all go on to different career paths that will require communicating ideas and results to different audiences. Potential future presentations for folks here include conference talks, investor pitches, policy meetings, lectures, press conferences, court hearings, patient diagnoses, TED talks, and more. Each of these requires a different approach and each of us can use student seminar to prepare for these potential careers. Beyond career choices, we can use student seminar to discover our science communication style in general. We can use this space to experiment with what approaches work best for us to individually communicate our results.

Expectations for Feedback

Feedback should be constructive, identifying what worked well and what could be improved and how those aspects could be improved. Identifying weakness without providing suggestions can be unconstructive, especially when the feedback is personal. Note that the survey question is "what do you like, what would you change”, not “what do you like, what don’t you like”. Here’s an example of poor and improved feedback:

• Poor feedback
• Improved feedback

It is of paramount importance to understand that receiving feedback can already be an emotionally challenging circumstance, even when provided constructively. Currently we use anonymous feedback to allow for more honesty, assuming that certain people may struggle to constructively criticize someone directly; if this anonymity helps you be more honest, please do so without being hurtful. A good guideline for how to provide feedback at student seminar:

1. Golden rule: Would the feedback you’re giving be helpful for you? How would you feel receiving the feedback you are giving?