Talks

I recently had the opportunity to deliver a talk on the energy transition to pre-university students.

Some reflections

• You can never be fully prepared for a talk. Especially if you're given a theme rather than a specific topic to speak on (the organisers asked me to talk about Green Technology). There's just too much to cover. Its a good problem to have. The best lectures and talks I've listened to are the ones that leave me hungry for more.
• What would help with the above is scoping. Setting limits on what I can realistically deliver within the constraints of the talk.
• What I wanted to do: Take the audience on a grand journey of energy transitions in the past, building up to where we are today, and how green energy will play a critical role in the next energy transition.
• What I found were my limits: My baseline knowledge on energy transitions, prep time (this was a volunteer thing that I prepared for outside working hours), speaking time (45 minutes including Q&A, with the organisers asking for interactivity).

How I would prepare for future talks (if the opportunity presents itself)

Immersion in the subject. I remember this quote from Nassim Taleb:

If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity . . . or get another job.

I don't think I 100% agree with this - some people learn better when they are forced to synthesise what they have learned, to teach others (Feynman technique comes to mind).

However, I do believe that true erudition on a topic can make for a masterful and beneficial talk.

If you have immersed yourself in the subject matter, delivering a talk requires no more than minimal prep.

Prep from an erudite baseline knowledge (I hope I'm using the word right) consists of framing the contents of the subject that are already within you to suit the audience. This contrasts with doing external research as part of the prep to fill out the draft outline you have developed (in my case, GPT3 helped with the draft skeleton). There is a subtle but meaningful difference between these two kinds of talks.

I aspired to deliver the talk from an erudite understanding of the subject, but the prep was humbling because it exposed how little I knew relative to what I wanted to share on this topic.

But I am maybe being hard on myself. A post-talk survey indicated that 43/47 students found it informative. Plenty of room to improve but not a bad way to deliver my first talk.

Update, a few days after publishing

This tweet provides some interesting pushback to my idea that you don't need anything but minimal prep to deliver a talk.