The presentation skills course started with a simple task: say your name and an object that you like and why you like it. The aim of this was for Samuel Lagier to learn our names, but also to show us how to create connections between a presenter and an audience—in this case through short personal stories. We then went on to discuss what makes a talk bad, and the basics of how to make a talk good. The main message of this course was to help us understand that a presenter is in a lot of ways like a mountain tour guide: they first need to be well prepared so that the whole group can arrive at the goal. In the case of the presenter this means that the audience has received and understood the message, for the success of a talk depends on what the audience gets out of it.

In order to make his own talk successful, Samuel applied various practical methods, such as challenging us to explain our research in less than ten words without technical terms, and to present this in front of the others. We also developed short stories as a group that highlighted how we as human beings tend to be interested in conflict and resolution. We as presenters should consider that a good way to relate our science to the audience is to show them the problem/challenge/question and then the solution.