First talk at useR! Oslo

So last Monday, I gave my first ever talk at useR! Oslo.

If you’ve come just for the slides, you can find them here otherwise I wrote up a short post on why I did this:

I volunteered to do this for four reasons.

1. I wanted to stretch myself and improve my presentation skills
2. I wanted to explore tidymodels
3. I want to get to know the R community better. Both to give back and also to work with other people
4. And finally, I wanted to actually finish one of my football analyses.

There were also lots of things I learnt while preparing for and giving this talk. Here’s a quickly written list. It’s not ordered in any way:

1. Don’t overcomplicate things! It’s very difficult to convey really technical details so simple examples are key.
2. The weekend before the talk, I had serious imposter syndrome but I assure you that there will be at least one person who will learn something from you. Also the audience was very wecloming and I learnt a lot from other peoples comments and questions.
3. Bring the data to life - it was a last minute decision to put some video of football events to help describe the data and I had underestimated how much that helped the audience understand what I was saying.
4. Slow down! This is big for me. I read recently that even though a 5 second pause feels like eternity to you while up there but it is great for the audience to digest the content.
5. Get there early so you can meet others who are early and develop a rapport. This way, they won’t seem so daunting! Also gives you a chance to test out your equipment and make sure everyone can see your slides from the back of the room.
6. Make it personal. I had gifs and memes in there which did two things. One, made the audience laugh and two they gave me some natural breaks.
7. Time time time. This I completely failed on, I thought I wouldn’t have enough to say but I actually went over my time so it’s important to time your talk while you practise.
8. If you can, invite some friends/colleagues. I invited someone and it was great to have a friendly face in the audience.
9. Maybe not so much heavy code slides at the end of the presentation and so late in the day. I saw a few yawns as I was wrapping up.
10. Finally, make sure you have enough water with you. An hour of almost non stop talking is a very long time.

All in all, I recommend it. And if you’re in Oslo, they are looking for more speakers from all walks of life and all levels.