Meeting Guidance for Organisers, Speakers and Rapporteurs.

Meeting Guidance for Organisers, Speakers and Rapporteurs

Download full guidance for speakers, organisers and rapporteurs

Notes for Speakers

Guidance for speakers is given below.

Thank you for your interest in our meeting. Membership of the Society is not compulsory for attending these free meetings, but please consider joining if you can because without our membership support we would not be able to hold these meetings: http://www.rmets.org/membership.php

National meetings are usually held on the third Wednesday of the month, from October to June at a variety of venues around the country (see Directions below).

We take questions at the end of each talk. We would like to encourage all levels of questions; from basic understanding of the topic to probing criticism.

Please take a couple of minutes to fill in and return the Feedback Form in order to help us improve our meetings. All your feedback is reviewed by the meetings committee and please note that a summary of the feedback will be given to speakers.

Directions to Imperial College
The Society uses the Blackett Lecture Theatre in the Department of Physics on the South Kensington Campus of Imperial College. The street address is:
Prince Consort Road, London, SW7 2BW. Building 6 on campus map: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/32853696.PDF

By Bus from Central London
London Transport Buses nos 9, 10 and 52 drive past the Albert Hall which is a 2-minute walk from Prince Consort Road. Bus no.9 from Piccadilly Circus or Hammersmith, no.52 from Victoria Coach Station and no.10 from Oxford Street. See also http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/campusinfo/southkensington for more travel information.

By Tube from Central London
The nearest tube stations are Gloucester Road and South Kensington, about a 15 minute walk from campus.

Directions to the University of Reading
These meetings will either be in the Department of Meteorology or at one of the University’s lecture theatre facilities. Information about how to find the University and how to reach it by different transport routes can be found at http://www.reading.ac.uk/ and follow the link to ‘Visit us’ under the heading ‘Things to do now’.

The Meteorology Department is Building number 58 and the Palmer lecture theatre building number 26 on the campus map at: http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/find/about-findmap.asp

Bus numbers 9, 20 and 21 go from the station to Whitenights campus for the Palmer lecture theatre but you need bus no.17 from Friar Street to the Earley Gate entrance for the Department of Meteorology

 

Guidance to Speakers

1. Thank you for agreeing to speak at our National meeting. We look forward to hearing you.

2. National meetings cater for a broad audience, and only a minority will be specialists in your field, so please be careful with the more technical material. In particular, a large number of equations can be difficult to follow in a short talk, so please only use equations when they are really necessary.

3. A good model for a Society talk is to spend a roughly comparable time on:

  • why you did the work (main motivation and background)
  • how you did it (essentials of the method)
  • what you found (main results)
  • what it means (main conclusions)

4. Please show a Summary slide where appropriate.

5. You will be asked to provide a short abstract to advertise your talk approximately one month before the meeting. Please feel free to include a figure.

6. Timing: please allow adequate time per slide for the audience to absorb it. For a 20 minute talk, some 10 to 20 slides are recommended, depending on their content. Please also allow 5 minutes for discussion. We normally take questions at the end of each talk.

7. Please do all you can to make your talk audible and visible right to the back of a fairly large lecture theatre.

  • We will provide lapel microphones but you should still face the audience and speak clearly and not too fast. Please use the microphones as we do make audio recordings of many of the talks (with your permission) and importantly we do have people who use the ‘hearing loop’ within the lecture theatre which is connected to the microphones. Remember that the partially deaf and non-native English speakers need to see your lips move.
  • Keep the complexity of graphs to the minimum but label everything. Remember that red/green colour-blindness is quite common. The main point is please keep your slides as simple as possible.
  • Please spell out each acronym at least once.

8. The organiser will ask to see a draft of your talk about a week before the meeting to check the length and level of the content. Please also try to find time to show your talk to a colleague before the meeting to get additional feedback on clarity and timing.

9. We do like to show presentation on our website so we would encourage you to make this or an amended version available for us to put on the web. We also like to record audio from some of our meetings, and in particular question and answer and discussion sessions. A member of the Society team will be at the meeting and will ask you to sign a permissions form. If you have any questions regarding this the Society representative at the meeting will be able to help.

10. There is no dress code.

 

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