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A Ph.D. defense is one of those things that one can never feel prepared enough for because usually, it is the first time one is doing it! In this post, I try to paint a picture of how to successfully defend your Ph.D. thesis including how to make the slides for your defense talk.

The audio version of this post:

I go over mine here, having successfully defended my doctoral thesis in particle astrophysics a little over 48 hours ago.

The defense is 2 hours long. You give a talk, answer questions, work stuff out on the board, and survive.

Usually, there is a public part of one hour where you could invite friends and family.

I figured: it’s an exam – it’s go-time.

I am “defending” means I must be, at least, somewhat under attack.

If there is going to be war, I am ready and I didn’t want distractions, so I told my friends and family not to come.

It was me, and the 5 committee members.

They started by closing the door and saying alright, we can torture you for two hours!

So, you know, it’s up to you.

Do you want no distractions but be alone with them for two hours or do you want some supporters empathizing with you for the first hour?

I made a choice there and I am fine with it.

The talk

As part of defending you write a talk that would leave plenty of time for questions.

Using something like PowerPoint.

My talk was 63 slides including the title slide (above), introduction slides, 6 backup slides, and 4 “divider” slides.

Quick orientation

After the title slide, I included a “quick orientation” slide.

I have done this in job talks as well and it helped.

It tells people roughly what to expect.

Motivation/introduction

Then I do some motivation and introduction slides – I had a total of 7 of these.

Especially making sure to motivate anything that is important to the research I will go over later.

Here is one such slide. It shows where my experiment is on the energy scale as compared to other experiments/collaborative efforts.

All of the other experiments are either particle or particle astrophysics experiments.

This slide serves multiple purposes. It is good to acknowledge other experiments and demonstrate knowledge of the field while pointing out why your experiment is unique.

As part of my introduction slides, I explained the basic principle underlying our main detection method.

Most questions

This is the slide that I got the most questions on.

I was grilled on all parts of it to exhaustion and definitely feel that I could have kept things more straight here.

I got questions on almost every introduction slide and they involved board work.

I knew the committee was not trying to attack me but it was still kind of rough.

As a senior grad student, I had been spending all my time with research, not the basics and coursework.

I had studied for the defense – I went back to undergrad and grad E&M and particle physics books, re-read class notes, etc.

All that helped.

But they still found spots that I was weaker on that day.

Always learning!

The key was to get back on track with the talk once each grilling session was done.

My brain was tired. It didn’t help that I was up till 2 am the previous night.

Then again, being tired is nothing unusual for a grad student and we can still put up a fight, right? Right.

Bounce back and pounce again. Like nothing happened. This was challenging but had to happen in order for me to get through the presentation and show the stuff where I am the boss: my research.

The experiment

I introduced the experiment that I knew and loved.

Here I am with a postdoc colleague, Linda, in front of the ANITA-4 payload in Antarctica.

I had 6 slides, including this one, on the experiment and how it worked.

My stuff

The rest of the talk was my research, stuff I had done, and owned, and published, or not yet published – whatever, it was my stuff.

I used a divider slide to announce the start of a new section of research.

I presented 4 main projects in my talk and put a divider slide before each one.

In the divider slide, I put 2 pieces of information with the goal of providing a very quick summary.

A title or brief description of the project I was about to present. And a hyperlink to the publication associated with the project if there was one out already.

I put the web address to the published article in the hyperlink and edited the text that would show up to say the journal’s name and volume number.

Below is my divider slide for the start of the first main project I presented.

This project involved doing the collaboration’s main analysis.

This is the sort of project/paper that pays the bills.

So it’s important, so I put it first.

Another divider slide is below.

This project is on the instrument and fortunately, what I worked on for the instrument greatly improved our livetime so I could talk about that.

I loved this project. It was mission-critical and therefore, very exciting and rewarding.

In this divider, I also added a hyperlink to a “trailer video” I have made on the project. The video is pretty entertaining so I thought I would include it in case there was a chance to show it.

The other 2 projects I presented did not yet have publications – they are the more recent projects I have worked on.

I only showed a couple of slides on this project.

This was a short project in terms of the scope and mainly involved simulations.

I enjoyed it and it was sort of optional – which is great for learning!

This is the last project I worked on and the last project I covered in my talk.

I was heavily invested in this project and driving it from the start, but got to work on it mainly at the end of my time.

This slide has happy memories from when I was in the UK doing some of the groundwork for this project.

More questions

Like any normal physicist, the stuff that I dread getting grilled on is statistics – and, of course, that came up too.

I got through my slides, said my conclusions, and answered more questions.

The last question I got had to do with a rainbow and a puddle and Brewster’s angle and I didn’t get it.

At the end

I went out of the room feeling terrible about the rainbow question, thinking: does this mean I fail.

It was a few minutes before I got my result but felt like forever.

I sat in a chair down the hall. Such a strange and vulnerable feeling to be done as I could no longer do anything about it.

I didn’t want to see anyone until I heard the result.

Students in the group kept passing by me as they – the kind souls – were setting up a celebration in the analysis room.

I told them to go away.

Then the committee called me in again.

I always envisioned myself collapsing at this moment but ended up acting totally normal as they shook my hand one by one saying things like “congratulations”, “great job”, and “nice job.”

The “How to PhD” blog and book

If you are feeling overwhelmed or stuck in graduate school, you are not alone. You can get help to navigate those situations both in this blog and in the book. It is packaged more efficiently in the book, of course, which is why people have found it worthwhile to just get the book. The information is presented step-by-step there and in an organized manner.

Having said that, I am not trying to push you to buy the book. I am perfectly happy if you just read the blog, too! I just want you to succeed and to know your options for getting maximum support during graduate school and after. That is my ultimate goal.

GOT A QUESTION? GUESS WHAT, YOU CAN ASK ANY QUESTION IN THE COMMENTS OF ANY POST INCLUDING THIS ONE AND I WILL WRITE A POST TO ANSWER IT.