This week I achieved a major career goal: I prepared my lab meeting slides in less than two hours. For more than ten years—from undergrad to postdoc—I’ve spent many late nights “perfecting” slides and showing up to my presentation exhausted with frayed nerves from sleep deprivation. It’s a terrible habit that isn’t productive. Receiving and hearing constructive criticism is even more difficult than usual when I’m physically exhausted. At best this over-exertion will may elicit a “good job” from a kind lab mate, but at worst it has left me in tears from feeling like that overtime was unappreciated. There must be a more balanced approach to giving these routine presentations. After two years of being a postdoc, I finally feel like I’m finding that sweet spot. Which means it’s time to impart some unsolicited advice in the hopes of sparing even just one fellow researcher another sleep-less night. There’s no single right way to give a lab meeting, but hopefully these quick pointers will help you build a general framework that suits your needs.

Let’s start with the most important consideration: your audience. If you’re giving lab meeting this typically means your PI and lab mates. In my 11 years of being a researcher, I’ve worked for many wonderful PIs and they’ve all shared the same view. Lab meeting is for everyone. Every lab member’s input is valuable. This means that the presentation should be geared towards the entire lab. Find out ahead of time what they expect out of someone’s slides. Crafting your lab meeting requires balancing the needs of the experts in the audience (i.e., your PI and maybe some others depending on the situation) with those who have a budding interest in your project (e.g., a rotation student). Plan to do this background research far in advance of your presentation and take notes on what you find. For example, if you use Evernote you might have a note titled, “Expectations for lab meeting presentations” where you jot down feedback. By doing this in advance, you automatically have a structure in mind to build on when you’re feeling stressed and pressed for time.

Speaking of structure, most lab meeting presentations have a ubiquitous flow or outline. The presentation can be broken down into sections, and the amount of time spent in each of these areas will vary depending on where you are in your research, but the sections will remain. It’s much like the outline of a scientific paper: introduction, motivation, approach, results, conclusion, and always, an acknowledgements section. Since starting my postdoc I’ve added a “Meeting Goals” slide at the beginning to help my audience understand the areas in which I need feedback and so that we, as a group, can stay focused on the goal of the meeting. As my postdoc co-mentor often says, “Every meeting should have a goal.” I also like to include an outline slide to give my audience a preview of what we’re going to discuss. This gives them a roadmap for the presentation, which might help them judge whether to save a question for later. Redundant as it sounds, I use the same rough outline for every presentation. That means I’m not spending time reinventing the wheel when I sit down to make slides. Which brings us to the piece de resistance itself: the slides.

So how did I pull together 84 lab meeting slides in less than two hours? As you might of guessed, I wasn’t making them from scratch. Yes, many of us will often repurpose our intro/background/motivation slides. But what was unique for this presentation was that I was repurposing “Project Documentation” slides that I had started making in the last six months. Like many postdocs, I manage multiple sub-projects. To stay organized and focused, I started making PowerPoint presentations for each sub-project when it reaches a critical milestone. I’ve been using these slides to drive one-on-one discussions with my mentors. The slides include immediate goals, specific methods, key results, and next steps. When it came time to put together my lab meeting presentation this past week, I started with my rough structure (i.e., knowing that the expectation for me specifically would be a major data update), setup the outline in my PowerPoint file, then dragged in the data slides from the Project Documentation files. Of course, they needed some edits to improve the flow, but it was an entirely different experience. I didn’t compromise my well-being in the name of a perfect lab meeting. I was able to focus on just sharing my progress.

Nearly all the researchers that I’ve worked with get anxious about giving lab meeting. I still get anxious about it. Yesterday I did my first UCI Elite Women’s cyclocross race. This meant toeing the line with some of the most talented women in the country, knowing I’d perform in the bottom 25% of field. As my heart fluttered away before the race start, I recognized those palpitations as the same ones that visit me before lab meeting. The only difference is that when it comes to bike racing, I prioritize my physical and mental health above all else so that I have the strength to deal with the anxiety. Why shouldn’t I do the same when it comes to lab meeting? To get the most out of the experience, I need to be in a mental space where I can be a good listener and be receptive of the feedback that my cherished and esteemed colleagues are trying to provide. The best way to do that is to get a good night’s rest, to not over-invest emotionally, and to just find all the ways to relax about the process—including finding hacks for saving time. I’m certain I’ll continue being anxious about meetings in the future, but it’s exciting to feel like I’m making progress towards that nebulous goal of not “sweating the small stuff.”   

If you have tips you want to share with the world about how to prepare for lab meeting, please share them in the comments. It would be really fun to use this space as an opportunity for all to share how they approach the presentation and even to learn about different PI’s ways of setting expectations for their lab members.