Do you wish you sounded more confident while presenting, without rehearsing every sentence? Do you sometimes fear you will have a blackout or make a mistake? Or struggle to respond clearly to unexpected questions?

Why this course?

As a PhD candidate, presenting is not optional. You present your research in meetings, at conferences, during grant interviews, teaching moments, and in many informal academic conversations, where how you present determines whether you can achieve what you intend with your audience. In these moments, effective presenting can make the difference between ideas and careers that move forward and those that remain unheard. Presenting is often challenging, and even extensive preparation does not always guarantee the result you were hoping for. Even with a strong structure and clear slides, you can still feel tense, constrained, or thrown off when situations change. The solution often is not to prepare more. The solution often is to effectively train your presentation skills under real life conditions.

The Presentation Skills Lab is designed to offer you exactly that. Rather than focusing on perfect preparation, this course helps you develop the ability to stay present, think clearly and communicate with professional confidence under academic pressure. This allows you to use presentations more strategically, whether your aim is to convince, align, secure support, attract collaborators, or teach.

This course is intended for PhD candidates who want to strengthen their presentation skills, and who see presentations as a key instrument in shaping their academic trajectory and opportunities.

Course description

This is a practice based, experiential training with a strong focus on improvisation as an academic skill. Improvisation here does not mean acting or performing, but learning to think, decide and communicate professionally under uncertainty.

The focus is not on developing or polishing presentation content, but on how you deliver, adjust and communicate effectively with your content. Through carefully designed exercises, you will train flexibility, responsiveness and presence in a safe and focused learning environment. The emphasis is on doing, reflecting and refining, so that insights translate directly into your daily academic practice.

Course objectives

In this course you will actively practice, and gain valuable feedback on:

• presenting with clarity, presence and professional confidence;
• adapting your message to different audiences and communicative aims (e.g. conferences, grant panels, teaching, internal meetings);
• responding effectively to questions, interruptions and uncertainty ;
• staying connected to your purpose and your audience, rather than striving for perfection;
• developing a presentation style you can rely on throughout your academic career and possibly beyond.