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 3rd to the 4th
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?
