What's new with Speak Like a Scholar

The WCC has helped students looking to improve their academic presentation skills for 5 years with Speak Like a Scholar (or SLaS), and we’ve recently made a few changes to ensure we help even more students get comfortable speaking in front of an audience. After hearing from students who wanted to participate but couldn’t attend our week-long session due to coursework, lab, teaching, and family responsibilities, we turned it into a more flexible 6-week program. Now, whether you’re a night owl, in a different time zone, or working during the day, you can still participate fully in SLaS at a time that works best for you! 

We’ve also expanded our material to make sure it’s relevant for graduate students in different stages of their degrees. Master’s students can now learn strategies for a great conference presentation while PhD students learn what goes into a successful dissertation defense. Any graduate students interested in giving presentations to non-academic audiences can also learn the basics of public scholarship. 
Our goal with this update to our popular program is to help students gain knowledge and confidence in the different kinds of presentations they want to learn about – whether those are formal defenses, online conference presentations, or even YouTube videos. 

As always, SLaS teaches you the basics of academic presentation skills, including outlining and drafting your spoken presentation and creating engaging visual support. With this knowledge, you can create a presentation that helps your audience be as excited about your research as you are.  

We hope these changes will help more students take part in a program that has helped previous participants feel more confident and excited about giving presentations.  

For more information or to apply to the program, visit our Speak Like a Scholar page.