I like Perry Rhodan a lot.

If you’re not German, and even if you are German, you might not have heard of Perry Rhodan, so here is a quick high level summary. Perry Rhodan is a German pulp magazine sci-fi series. It has, somehow, been in continous publication since 1961. It is still very much published as pulp issues - at time of writing, we’re on issue #3226. This makes it probably the longest continuous story ever written. The series is written collaboratively by many authors taking turns with overarching guidance from a core team.

If you are a university student, you’ll sometimes have to give presentations about research, mostly in seminars, but also for a thesis. I’ve supervised a lot of those as a PhD student, and I’ve seen people Do A Presentation Badly in all kinds of ways. Since, as an advisor, it’s much more fun to say “Wow! what a great presentation! we’re giving you the best grade!” than “we’re passing you, but only because we don’t want to be put through this again next year.”, I eventually started writing the ones that I think are most easy to dodge down so I wouldn’t forget anything when talking to students and giving feedback.

I think that this helped me a bit, so maybe it can help you? So here are, in no particular order, some things that I think would be good for students to keep in mind when doing a seminar or thesis presentation.