SSA members enjoy complimentary webinars, workshops and mentoring sessions. See below for upcoming opportunities.
Effective Scientific Public Speaking, Slides and Poster Design
Polish your presentation skills with Ross S. Stein, communications expert and earthquake scientist.
This five-part online course leading up to the Annual Meeting is complimentary for SSA members (membership must be valid through 2025 to participate in the course). Need to renew? Please click here to renew or become a member.
Register for all sessions, or feel free to choose individual sessions as your schedule allows.
Questions? Contact membership@seismosoc.org.
#1 ➤ Talk Openers (Register Here)
- Part A: Tuesday, 14 January from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
- Part B: Thursday, 16 January from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
Learn how to engage an audience in the first two minutes of your talk.
The opener is the most important two minutes of any talk, regardless of its length or setting. In the opener, you are planting your flag and making your case. The three best approaches to engage an audience and leave a lasting impression are to tell a story, pick a fight or do a demo. You should not show an outline, coauthors, institutions or introduce the subject.
#2 ➤ Builder Slides and Opener/Closer Slides (Register Here)
- Part A: Tuesday, 4 February from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
- Part B: Thursday, 6 February from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
Learn how to pace information during your oral presentation.
Builder slides gradually add information so the audience does not get overwhelmed. Opener/closer slides have an affinity for each other that communicate to the audience that they have returned to the beginning, but now with a deeper or new understanding.
#3 ➤ Model+Data Slide Sequences (Register Here)
- Part A: Tuesday, 25 February from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
- Part B: Thursday, 27 February from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
Learn how to demonstrate and focus on your central concepts.
This is the central portion of most talks. The goal is to free the slides and presentation to show just one or a few models, focusing on the concepts, not the details. A talk is not a paper, and so generally it is not the place for uncertainty analyses or explorations of model space.
#4 ➤ Poster Design (Register Here)
- Part A: Tuesday, 18 March from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
- Part B: Thursday, 20 March from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
Learn how to clearly display your principal findings to diverse audiences.
Making your poster a beautiful canvas with a banner title that telegraphs the principal finding, not the subject matter, is key—what you found, not what you did. Posters are reader-driven, not speaker-driven, so they need to be inviting and self-explanatory. They also need a lot of breathing room, with no boxes or figure numbers. They are a graphic rather than textual experience, so make it dramatic.
#5 ➤ Talk Closers (Register Here)
- Part A: Tuesday, 1 April from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
- Part B: Thursday, 3 April from 9-10:30 AM Pacific
Learn how to leave a lasting impression and effectively launch into the Q&A.
You are returning the audience to where they began, but now wiser. Talks, like novels or movies, are circles—or, better yet, helixes—that close back on themselves, with new insight or perspective.