Introduction

As a guest giving a talk, you will be the main event for the first 30 minutes of the outreach event. Events such as these commence with your talk and are followed by 90 minutes of astrophotography slideshows and/or telescope observing. While observing is dependent on weather, your lecture is not (although it may have affect the size of your audience). You are expected to arrive at Pupin 301 20-30 minutes before your lecture begins, so that we can get you set up on the projector, microphone and work out the kinks.

Topic Choice and Talk Preparation

For those of you putting together a public lecture, I recommend you prepare it as though you are explaining an astronomical topic to someone seated next to you on an airplane with no background in science. I tell parents of children who might attend, that children will likely get something out of the lecture, but not necessarily everything, so you needn't cater the talk to children alone. When choosing a topic for a lecture, make sure it is a subject that intrigues you, a subject that will potentially intrigue a layperson, and it is a topic on which you are knowledgeable. Oftentimes the best topics are *not* related to your own research.

Make it interactive!

While we generally have a large group and can't physically move around a room or do an activity, we strongly encourage you to be interactive in your talk! Some ways you can do that is to poll the audience and/or ask them to raise their hands in response to a question, tell an appropriate joke, ask them to meet or talk to their neighbor, do a demonstration, use a prop, and act out concepts! If you want to discuss any ideas further or ask an opinion about if something will work with our audience, don't hesitate to reach out.

Titles & Talk Description

At the beginning of the semester, you will be asked for a title and an one paragraph description of the topic of your talk. Try to make the title a little intruiging, as it is designed for a public audience. For some reason, audiences are most attracted by talks about black holes and extraterrestrial life (at least, the numbers correlate that way). The abstract is simply a small paragraph describing your talk that will be used on the website and in the fliers for your lecture. While the beginning of the semester is still quite early, it might be a good time to start thinking about your talk so you have ample time to make slides, practice it, etc before the big day!

Audience

Turnout for our lectures is typically around 50-200+ people - a mixture of Columbia students (15%), local families (20%), amateur astronomers (5%) and interested adults from the community (60%). At a recent event we took an informal poll of the attendees and determined that only 25% of them were affiliated with the University, meaning that 75% of our audience is from the general public as a whole (great news)! Furthermore, 25% of our audience is coming from outside of Manhattan, which surprised us all.

Resources

In Pupin 301, the lecture hall where we hold these talks, we have several resources at your disposal: 5 chalk boards, a digital projector, a DVD/VHS player, a video camera to project books and other non-digital images, a speaker system and a wireless microphone. The speaker system is set to work with the wireless microphone (but you do not need it if you project your voice well) as well as the output headphone jack from your laptop. You will need to bring a laptop, dongle, pointer and presentation. If you do not have a laptop or laser pointer, we can use the ones purchased for the astronomy lab by the department, but please let us know in advance that this is what you plan to do. If you'd like to use props but don't have them handy, we can work with you to see if we can borrow them.

Talk Duration

The duration of your talk is 30 minutes. In general, you will probably have way too much to say to fit it into 30 minutes, so please practice your talk in advance and truncate it to 30 minutes. In the past we have had problems with people exceeding their 30 minutes of allocated time, sometimes taking as much as 1.5 hours! This will no longer be tolerated. The Lecture Captain will signal you at 25 minutes, 30 minutes and cut you off at 35 minutes. I'm sorry, but the show must go on!

Awards

In order to recognize the outstanding work done by our speakers, we now offer the APPLAUSE award (along with a bottle of champagne) to the best public outreach talk of the year. You could be the next winner if you excel in the following criteria (interesting topic, content effectively conveyed, fluidity of presentation). Please see the wiki link for more details.

Good luck, and please let outreach coordinators know if you have any questions about preparation for your lecture.