Guidelines for the presentations, exercises and the questions 

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• The person giving the presentation should have a meeting with the seminar teacher/assistant prior to the presentation (preferably 1 week before the presentation). He/She should also select one exercise to be solved by the seminar participants and discuss about it with the teacher/assistant during the meeting.
• Students should write a written report in regard to their topic.
• The written report should be at least 15 pages long. All the written presentations, will also be available in the PDF format from the course Web pages. Therefore, at the presentation, you should also provide the teacher with an electronic version of your report. The format of the written reports should be the same as the format of the sample report available at this site. Please note that the format of the above mentioned sample report is RTF. Remember that the format of the electronic version of your report when saving must also be RTF.
• Paper copies of the written report should be distributed amongst the participants of the course before the presentation.
• Every Student provides the solution of his/her selected exercise to the assistant of the course.
• The exercise that is given at the end of each presentation should be returned within 3 weeks to the seminar assistant.

Each presentation will last approx. 45 minutes with questions and discussion included. Presentations will be held in English.

It is assumed that transparencies are used for the oral presentation. The material should be carefully selected, since 45 minutes is rather a short time for the detailed covering of all the material presented in the book. A good rule of thumb is that on average for every slide one should allocate at least 2 minutes of time, therefore, 20 slides is usually more than enough for the oral presentation.

You should also think in advance that in case of shortage of time, which slides you could skip. By rehearsing your presentation in front of your family, colleagues or even your dog, you will get a very good estimate on the length of your presentation. Microsoft's PowerPoint rehearsal feature could be a very useful tool for this task.

This is very important when you are having a presentation in a language other than your mother tongue, since very often, a better part of the presentation time will be wasted on searching proper words, if you have not done the above mentioned rehearsal!

2.1 Transparencies preparation

Use large fonts (18-24 pt) for your transparencies. In general, the "Landscape" format is a better choice compared to the "Portrait". Try not to use so much text in your slides. Concentrate on the essential things rather than details, since details could be found in the book! It is allowed to copy the formulas and figures that are used in transparencies from the book, but text should not be directly photocopied.

2.2 Oral presentation

Speak clearly and loud enough so that the participants sitting at the last row could also hear you. Stimulate and encourage the questions by using phrases such as "Very good question!", but do not answer the question by talking nonsense! Do not spend too much time on the appearance of your talk but more on the topic. Remember that if you have prepared the presentation well, everything will be fine!

If you yourself have not understood some part of your presentation, bring it up. This will not effect your grade. In a scientific research, it is important to be honest about what you know and what you don't. Perhaps by bringing it up, the matter becomes clear, since one amongst the participants may know about it. Remember that as a speaker, you are not necessarily the specialist of the topic.