Third Year Graduate Seminar in Organic Chemistry

  All graduate students in the PhD program are required to present a seminar to the Organic Division during the third year of their program. The PowerPoint slides will be posted on the web.

The Seminar Abstract

A copy of all of the slides in the seminar (printed 6/page) and a list of all of the references cited should be prepared and copies made for the use of audience.

The Seminar Presentation

  It is your option as to whether to use a chalkboard, 35 mm slides, overhead transparencies, or a computer projection (Powerpoint) to present your talk.

   As you probably know, the faculty discusses each third year graduate student's seminar and then sends a letter of evaluation to the presenter. Based on the talks given over the last several years, we offer some general suggestions to students who will be preparing talks for the coming academic year. Although most of the seminars presented in the department (by students and by outside speakers) are very good, some are less satisfactory. If one is thinking critically about presentation strategy, a great deal can be learned from these less satisfactory seminars––about what not to do.

  1) Employ a logical organization. The overall organization of a presentation is very important. Proper attention to this aspect of the talk can profoundly enhance the amount of knowledge your listeners carry away from the talk, and, directly or indirectly, implant a more favorable impression of you in your listeners' minds (an important consideration when you are interviewing for a job). It can be helpful to present an introductory outline of your subject–a preliminary section of the talk in which you alert your listeners to the most important elements of your presentation. As you move through the body of the talk, you can refer back to that initial outline, at least verbally, and reinforce explicitly those points that you believe to be central. At the end, a summary in which the key points are reviewed helps to cement your message. In pursuing this organizational strategy, you must avoid becoming overly repetitive, but some repetition is necessary if new ideas and facts are to stick in your listeners' minds.

  2) Be selective; do not try to present everything known in a given area. Two related considerations in a successful seminar presentation are the amount of material you cover and the pace at which you cover it. If you try to cover too broad a range of information, you risk confusing (and therefore losing) your audience, because of inadequate explanation of new concepts and/or too rapid a barrage of new facts. You must present enough material to keep the listeners' attention, but not so much that an informed listener cannot be thinking critically as you go. Striking the proper balances, therefore, requires that you eliminate superfluous details from your talk. For example, in a talk on the total syntheses of a class of natural products, one should focus on the most interesting, novel and strategically important reactions, minimizing consideration of more mundane intermediate steps.

  3) Identify the most important structural and mechanistic issues and discuss some of them in depth. Be critical in your reading and presentation. Every third year seminar should have a minimum mechanistic and structural content. Whatever topic you choose, remember that your listeners are organic chemists, and organic chemists think in terms of three-dimensional structures and mechanisms. In a presentation on a synthetic method, for example, a long list of examples is much less enlightening than a selected list discussed in the context of a mechanistic rationale. Even when mechanistic and structural issues are considered, a third year talk can suffer from a lack of critical thinking on the part of the presenting student.

   Mechanisms are never 'proven', but rather are consistent with experimental observations. (The broader the range of observations explained by a mechanistic hypothesis, the stronger the hypothesis.) When you present a mechanism or other complex explanation, do not simply repeat what you have read; instead, tell your audience why the explanation is accepted and how other alternatives have been invalidated experimentally. In the best talks, the speaker goes even further, pointing out alternative acceptable hypotheses and/or critical experiments that have yet to be performed. (In this light, remember when choosing your topic that fields in which there is mechanistic controversy can lead to the most interesting seminars.)

  4) Whether your topic is rooted in traditional or non-traditional organic chemistry, your introduction should give the audience a context within which to appreciate the material that you are presenting. The boundaries between traditional scientific disciplines are eroding. As the frontiers of 'organic chemistry' expand (into materials science and chemical biology, for example), more and more students choose topics a little displaced from the center of classical organic chemistry. We encourage such choices. Still, students should focus their seminar on the organic chemical issues embedded in their particular topic. The pace and structure of such a talk may have to be different from those in a more familiar area of physical or synthetic organic chemistry, because new methods and concepts must be explained thoroughly. In any case, do not simply present a broad overview, or focus on non-chemical aspects of science or technology. For example, a seminar describing a new synthetic method is more interesting and memorable when the audience is apprised of the difficulties of accomplishing the transformations you are discussing.

  5) Some important technical points: