Revised 2025 March
The student seminar provides a valuable opportunity to develop skill in the presentation of your scientific work to an audience. Many students when first attending a conference will notice how this skill is sometimes sorely lacking in presentations. When important, exciting work is presented in a boring, confusing or otherwise inept manner, the audience is turned off and the scientific message is lost.
Students in graduate physics programs at Carleton and the University of Ottawa are required to participate in the OCIP seminar. The students will give a poster as well as a two minute talk summarizing the poster. These seminars can be a great help in developing the ability and confidence to present scientific talks.
The talk should be a brief advertisement of the work presented in the poster and addressed to a general audience of physicists.
The poster should not be a comprehensive report of your thesis work but focus on what you can clearly present to a general audience.
It should avoid excessive use of specialized terminology and in particular acronyms. The OCIP grad symposium brings together students and researchers from a wide range of fields within physics and what may be familiar to you may not be to most of the audience. Your title likewise should minimize jargon and appeal to a broad audience.
We would like to remind graduate students that attending departmental seminars is also a degree requirement. Seminars broaden your understanding of physics, expose you to work that may provide ideas for future directions of research, and can help plan your future talks and presentations.