Biology and Chemistry Seminar Guidelines

Guidelines for Participants and Presenters

Seminar provides an opportunity for all students majoring in Biology, Biochemistry or Chemistry to gain practical experience in verbally communicating scientific information. North Central students are required to register for Seminar three times, which don't need to be consecutive. The first two times you are considered to be a "participant" and will register for zero credits. You may substitute CHM190/BIO290/BIO291 ACCA seminar for one of these two required zero-credit seminars. The third time that you register for Seminar, you will register for one credit and are a "presenter."

Go to:
Participants
Presenters
Tips

Guidelines for Participants

As a participant, you benefit from seminar in two ways. First, there is the scientific information contained in the seminar. Often, the speaker will be presenting information that you haven't heard in another chemistry or biology course. The second benefit is observing how others present their seminars so that you can learn what will be expected of you when you present. You will see and hear that there are more effective and less effective ways to convey information. This information should give you some good ideas about what makes an effective presentation.

Expectations. In order to realize these benefits from seminar, it is essential that you listen attentively. More specifically, it is expected that you will attend all of the seminars, critique the student presentations and ask good questions.

We begin with the assumption that you will be an attentive participant, and thus we begin with the assumption that you will earn an A in BIO/CHM475 (congratulations!). If you miss more than one seminar, your grade will be reduced by one full letter grade. For example, if you miss two seminars, your grade will be reduced from an A to a B; if you miss three, your grade will be reduced to a C, and so forth.
For every student presentation that you see, you will need to fill out a critique sheet. Your critiques will be read by the seminar coordinator (but not by the student presenter) and will form a portion of the student's grade.
A scientific presentation is not just a speech, but a dialogue intended to both inform the audience and help the presenter further refine his/her ideas. Therefore, we expect that you will ask at least one substantive question during the term. If the presenter doesn't convey the information clearly, then you should ask questions to help you understand. Or, you may want to know more about some aspect of the project. Or your question might be a suggestion for improvement or a concern about some aspect of the experimental procedure or analysis. Failure to ask at least one substantive question will result in the lowering of your grade by one smaller step, such as from an A to an A-. Since you are receiving zero credits for the course, the grade will show on your transcript, but it will not count toward your GPA.

Guidelines for Presenters

Your first step to get ready to present in Seminar is to select a project (or part of a project) that you have done in the past and are ready to talk about. Start thinking about this early! Since it is exceptionally difficult to talk about work that isn't finished, you are strongly discouraged from presenting a research project during the same term that you are actively conducting the research project. The seminar coordinator (for Spring 2008, the coordinator is Dr. Jeff Jankowski) will try to accommodate students' requests for which week they will present, but it will not always be possible to choose when in the term you will be talking. In some cases, you may be scheduled to talk about your work in the first or second week of the term!

The project may have been done in a variety of different settings:

Many students will select a project that they did as part of a research course, such as BIO305, BIO416, BIO430, BCM465, CHM405, CHM410 or CHM420.
Other students will present work they have done as an independent study (BIO/CHM399, BIO/CHM499 or CHM480).
Still others will talk about summer research projects that were done either on-campus or off-campus.
Research-like experiences from other courses lack the independence and depth found in the research-designated courses and are not generally appropriate for seminar presentation. If special circumstances require that you present work from another course, you need to obtain permission in advance from the seminar coordinator).
Work done as part of an internship may or may not be acceptable. It is extremely important that the work described in your presentation be substantially your work, and that it be research. This is sometimes a problem for work undertaken in an internship, where you may have been merely a "pair of hands" doing routine experiments of someone else's design. If you're not sure if your project is appropriate, consult with the seminar coordinator).

In all cases, students will have a research mentor to help guide them through the process. The mentor needs to be a member of the Biology or Chemistry faculty at North Central College. In most cases, the mentor will be the same professor in whose class or laboratory the work was done. During the first week of the term, you will be required to provide the seminar coordinator with the name of your research mentor (get his or her permission first!) and a working title that describes the nature of the project that was done. You are encouraged to consult with your mentor early and frequently about how to best present your body of work. Furthermore, you are required to practice your presentation in front of your mentor at least a week before presenting in Seminar to work out any problems and polish your seminar.

Your grade in Seminar will be principally based on the quality of the presentation, not on the quality of the research itself. The faculty are looking for evidence that you understand what was done and that you are able to effectively communicate that to your peers.

As with any presentation, you need to carefully consider your audience. Because we have biology, biochemistry and chemistry majors you cannot assume that all of your audience has the same foundation as you do. We expect you to provide background information that is appropriate for students in a 200-level course.
It is your responsibility as the presenter to help your audience follow the talk. This will often involve spending significant time explaining the background and context of your work and demonstrating how your central question or hypothesis is important. Be sure to define key terms and concepts. In some cases, you may end up feeling like one of your professors, teaching a class.
Occasionally, it may be very difficult to explain all the details of some of the more complex analyses that you performed. But at a minimum, every student in the audience should leave the seminar understanding the basic question that you were asking, the experimental approach and the final conclusion.

What if your cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed project failed to yield meaningful results? That is not uncommon in research and doesn't need to be a major problem for presenting the work in Seminar. Focus on the background. Explain the importance of the problem and why your approach makes sense. In some cases, you may want to actually show some of the data from the papers that you read while setting up your project. Show your audience the results that you got and then explain to them why those results don't make any sense. Clarify what could be done better next time. With all of that, you can still have an excellent seminar even without satisfying experimental results.

You will have no more than 25 minutes to make your presentation with an additional five minutes for questions and answers. That sounds like a lot of time but it can slip away quickly when you're trying to present enough background for this diverse audience. Realize that it is not necessary to show every last bit of data that was gathered. For example, some of your early trials that failed may have been important to help you figure out how to run your assay, but these don't need to be shared with the audience. In general, it's better to present less information and present it well than to show a large dataset but explain it poorly. Many helpful suggestions can be found here.

You are required to email your title and abstract to the seminar coordinator) at least one full week before your presentation. The title and abstract will be posted on the course Web site and also on signs around the Science Center. Your abstract should be less than 200 words and needs to include the significance of the project, the research question you asked and a summary of the results. If you will require any audio-visual equipment other than what is normally available in the classroom, it is your responsibility to request that from the seminar coordinator) one week before your seminar.

Your grade in seminar will be based on critiques by faculty and by your peers that make comments on the content and style of the presentation. You will not receive these critiques, however. The critiques will be read by the seminar coordinator, who will write a response letter that summarizes the comments and assigns a grade to your presentation. At least two biologists and two chemists (including your research mentor) will review the response letter before it is sent to you.

Other expectations. Just like when you were a seminar participant, your attendance at seminar is required. If you miss more than one seminar, your grade will be reduced by one full letter grade for each seminar you miss. Failure to email your title and abstract to the seminar coordinator at least one full week before you present will also lower your grade by one full letter grade. Failure to practice your seminar at least once with your research mentor will also lead to the lowering of your grade. Finally, we expect that you will ask at least one substantive question during the term; if not, your grade will go down by one smaller step, such as from A to an A-.