If I try to think about my scientific talks two out of not too many come first to my mind. The presentation of the results of the thesis of the degree in chemistry is probably the best in my mother tongue (14th of July 2000) and the one I gave at the Biophysical Society annual meeting held in Salt Lake City in February 2006. The latter was my first presentation at an international meeting. I remember that I worked a lot on the preparation and the rehearsal of that talk.
This morning I attended a lecture on developing presentation skills. At the end of the lecture we had to work on a two minutes talk about our research topic in the event we were going to be selected for a videotaped presentation. So I was lucky enough to pick up the folded post-it with the letter p on it. Then, me and other six colleagues with a similar luck had to present something related to our research in a little bit more than a couple of minutes. I was kind of nervous because it usually takes me the same amount of time to introduce what kind of job I am doing. Could I have managed to give at least a general idea of what I was actually working on? the short answer is no. I was the last to present and I soon realised that I would have needed a better preparation.
After the last tragic short talk the lecturer played each short talk for about one minute. In this way each speaker had the chance to receive a helpful feedback from the lecturer and from the audience and to understand better her/his strengths and weaknesses. Apart from a tremendous lack of confidence and structure, my talk was not so bad. I received many useful advices from the lecturer and from the other colleagues, and hopefully they will help me to improve my presentation skills.
Andrea Catte 
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