Resources

Speaker one-slide guidance

You get one 16:9 image for seven minutes. If the slide is a paragraph, the audience will read instead of listen. If it is a logo, they will look at you and find nothing to hold. The job of the slide is to be the object the room can point at later — a chip layout, a bacterium at work, a before-and-after number rendered as a picture, a map. One focal point. High contrast. Type large enough to read from the back of a 400-seat hall (if you need more than about eight words, you need fewer words). No animation: motion is a DQ, and it is also a crutch. Test the file on a cheap projector and on a phone. Technical spec lives on Compete.

A useful test: mute yourself, show the slide for three seconds, and ask a colleague what the talk is about. If they say “science” or “a startup,” the slide has failed. If they say a concrete noun — “photonic chip,” “malaria test,” “CubeSat” — you have an anchor.

Example structure: hook, problem, mechanism, evidence, ask

This is a map, not a prison. Times are for the live seven minutes. The 90-second video should be a compressed pass through the same five moves, not a different genre.

1. Hook (about 45 seconds). A concrete moment. Last Tuesday, a clinic, a failed pour, a phone that thermal-throttled in a bus. Not “imagine a world.”
2. Problem (about 75 seconds). Who is hurt, how badly, why existing fixes fail. The audience must care before you explain a method.
3. Mechanism (about 150 seconds). How the thing actually works. One analogy. The slide earns its keep here. This is the four-minute gift versus a three-minute thesis format — use it, do not pad it. Comparison: The Field.
4. Evidence (about 75 seconds). One result, one number, one limitation you name yourself. Specificity beats authority. You may not demo; you may describe.
5. Ask (about 75 seconds). If this works, what changes, and what do you want? A lab collaboration, a manufacturing partner, a replication, a policy door — one ask, spoken as a sentence the room can quote. Then stop. Going 7:01 is a DQ.

Rehearsal plan

Five passes, on different days. Do not cram them into one evening.

1. Pass 1 — outline out loud, no slide, no timer. If you cannot tell it walking, you cannot tell it on stage.
2. Pass 2 — timer on, still no slide. Find the sentence that always overruns. Cut it. Most talks die in the mechanism because the speaker loves the second analogy.
3. Pass 3 — slide locked, record video. Watch it without sound, then without picture. Fix the one that failed harder.
4. Pass 4 — hostile room. Three colleagues sit as the panel roles: specialist, operator, communicator. They score the sheet. You do not argue.
5. Pass 5 — dress. Same shoes, same mic distance, full seven minutes, once. Then stop rehearsing the jokes. Record the 90-second application from this version, not from an older script.

Reading from notes is allowed and scored down. Memorise the first 45 seconds and the last sentence; let the middle be spoken, not recited. If AI helped you outline, disclose it in the application as required on Apply and FAQ.