Lecturer Instructions: What to Expect

Lecture Night Schedule

As the lecturer, you will be the main event for the first 30 minutes of the outreach night (see PublicLectures for a schedule of how the event will occur). Events take place in Hameetman Lecture Hall inside the Cahill Astronomy Building. Events such as these commence with your talk and are followed by 90 minutes of a panel Q&A and telescope observing on the adjacent athletic fields. While observing is dependent on weather, your lecture is not (although it may have affect the size of your audience). You are expected to arrive at Cahill 20-30 minutes before your lecture begins, so that we can get you set up on the projector, microphone and work out the kinks. After your talk and answering a handful of questions, we typically have the speaker join a Q&A panel consisting of a few members of the department to answer audience questions on a variety of topics. This goes on for about 45 minutes after your talk.

To get a better feel for how the event actually transpires, check out photos and videos, with speakers and titles for all of our previous lectures.

Topic Choice and Talk Preparation

I recommend you prepare your presentation as though you are explaining an astronomical topic to someone seated next to you on an airplane with no background in science. I tell parents of children who might attend, that children will likely get something out of the lecture, but not necessarily everything, so you needn't cater the talk to children alone. When choosing a topic for a lecture, make sure it is a subject that intrigues you, a subject that will potentially intrigue a layperson, and it is a topic on which you are knowledgeable. Oftentimes the best topics are not related to your own research. Check out our previous lectures for what's been covered recently as well as examples of previous titles / abstracts.

Titles and Abstracts

We request a title and abstract before the beginning of the talk season so we can make the schedule and posters (e.g. December before Spring, June before Fall). You can make the title simple or titillating, as it is designed for a public audience. Just don't be too clever, lest the audience might not get the reference. For some reason, audiences are most attracted by talks about cosmology, black holes, exoplanets, and extraterrestrial life (at least, the numbers correlate that way). The abstract is simply a small paragraph describing your talk that will be used on the website and in the fliers for your lecture. While the beginning of the semester is still quite early, it might be a good time to start thinking about your talk so you have ample time to make slides, practice it, etc before the big day! Try to use straightforward vocabulary and leave out any jargon that a public audience might not be familiar with.

Audience

To date, our audiences have been ranged from 50-200 people, but our events are growing. There has been a lot of age diversity in the audience: some families, some dates, some solo attendees. Fortunately, we haven't so far had any cranks who show up to promote their pet theories or show off their knowledge on a particular topic. A nice audience with no hecklers! Questions are usually asked following the lecture, and sometimes the questions are very insightful.

Resources

Hameetman lecture hall in Cahill has a digital projector into which you can plug your laptop. It accepts a standard VGA port but there are numerous USB-C and HDMI dongles present. If you have some weird port, bring a dongle. The auditorium also has a good sound system, and can be accessed using the standard 1/8" output from laptops. There are white boards/chalk board, and we can provide a laser pointer and remote control slide clicker. We ask that you wear a wearable microphone throughout your talk, but there is a handheld microphone if you prefer. The microphone not only is for assuring your audience can hear you, but for input to the video live streaming taking place. If you have additional resource requests for your talk or need a laptop on which to project your presentation, please contact me beforehand and we can try to work it all out.

Talk Duration

At the start of the night, the lecture captain will introduce you and make announcements for 2-3 minutes. The duration of your talk is 30 minutes. In general, you will probably have way too much to say to fit it into 30 minutes, so please practice your talk in advance and truncate it to 30 minutes. If your talk goes much beyond 30 minutes, the organizer may cut you off. I'm sorry--the show must go on! We'll accept a handful of questions from the audience for ~5 minutes before releasing the audience for stargazing and the panel Q&A.

Outreach Presentation Best Practices

• The purpose of these events is to educate the public to be more aware and appreciative of the science around them. So keep that in mind while assembling your presentation.
• Please refrain from injecting politics into the talk, particularly by denigrating specific politicians or groups as it can interfere with our ability as scientists to educate people. In fact, injecting politics into the talk can turn some audience members off to the scientific enterprise entirely, when these are precisely the people we need to be reaching. Please just use your best judgement in keeping your talk professional and for a wide audience.
• Please minimize any scientific jargon from your talk, or if you must use it, introduce it substantially. Remember, these are members of the public, not a colloquium audience. Pretend you're talking to someone you're seated next to on a plane, or your Uber driver, or an uncle from a family reunion.
• Please do not use a colloquium slide deck and turn it into a public talk. These are very different audiences and usually have very little overlap in their slides.
• Try to keep slides relatively simple--not a lot of text, and use images where it will enhance the point you're making. Oftentimes, I'll even use blank slides to get the audience to focus back on me and my message instead of being distracted by something on my slides.
• For the text you use on your slides, assure that it is relatively large so that people in the back can read it OK. The screen is big but not THAT big.
• When people ask you questions during the Q&A, please repeat their question before answering. This will assure that everyone in the audience, including the audience watching the recording, knows what was asked.
• Don't freak out about not knowing the answer to all questions--that's perfectly reasonable. If someone asks you a question you cannot answer, take a moment, think about it, and if you don't know, admit it. You can potentially offer up resources where they can find out more, or talk after the lecture, or tell them that no one knows the answer.
• Don't worry too much about the talk. Prepare, but it's going to go OK. The audience is one who wants to be there and is excited to hear about your science. It's a fun experience and most speakers come away from it energized!

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