On the way to Helsinki or... how to show your work as a research fellow

On the way to Helsinki or... how to show your work as a research fellow

The Nordic Meeting of Researchers in Competition Law Helsinki will be taking place from the 3^rd to the 4^th of October and I am very much looking forward to participating in it. Unlike most the events I have attended in the past year I will be one of the “performers” and not a mere spectator. In Helsinki I will be presenting in front of other Nordic PhD candidates and professors in competition law part of my research project. It is an interesting challenge and somewhat a compromise in which you have to balance the fear of failure with the excitement of spreading what you are working it.

The “cultural differences”

Different people have different presentation styles and skills. And as a non-Nordic speaker I have a lot of different traits from the ones I have observed in my time in Bergen. Something among the lines of “Lost in Academic Translation”.

It has turned out to be a surprise to me when I observe the presentations at the UiB; they are very well prepared, with plenty of intricate details (sometimes difficult for the audience to grasp if not educated in the field) and most of the team are read speeches with usually little to no visual aids, think of a .ppt presentation.

This was and still is a surprise to me. In my years as a student in Venezuela, Austria and other places I have attended seminars/competitions, etc, the rule of thumb is: do have visual aid (plenty if possible) and do not read from a piece of paper. In fact, I remember a course I had during my LLM in which reading caused automatic failure of the subject.

The “business man presentation”

My colleagues have told me that they find my presentation “North-Americanized” and not so European because of the business oriented approach when making a presentation. Let me elaborate a bit further on this.

I tend to prepare my presentations and make them as lively as possible. Think about a lot of gestures, walking around. I try to be dynamic, fast paced and motivated. I want people to listen to me and to do so I try to give them a “good show”.

Also, I refrain from making a topic extremely complicated; rather I aim towards making it accessible to the audience. This can be seen by others as making a rather simplistic presentation (a risk you can run) but by non-experts is easier to get interested in the talk.

As another general rule of thumb I usually initiate the talk with a line that usually causes either surprise or controversy. It is necessary, however, to be careful, because this can generate rejection to the content of your message or people can get with their mind just anchored on that issue.

The challenge

In Helsinki I will be presenting part of my on-going research project on the regulation of buyer power and monopsony in public procurement. Not only I have to prepare a talk, but I must prepare a talk keeping in my that the audience are those researchers I base my work on! Basically, I need to do a good presentation to “sell” my project and get some very much needed feedback. Maybe it is time for me to make a more “Nordic” presentation rather than a “business-like” one?

What do you think?