Students are curious:
Hello. Could you give me some advice about defending a diploma. What do instructors pay the most attention to? When you’re showing the presentation.
You need to focus on the substance.
Most likely the instructors will be bored at the defense. Because they aren’t interested and they don’t understand what the student was doing. Don’t try to make them like you. You need to put the most important things from the work onto the slides.
Personally, I always pay attention to the substance: what the student did, what the motivation for the work is, what problem they were solving, how deeply they dug into the problem.
It’s bad when a student starts giving a lecture. That is, retelling other people’s ideas. A diploma is original work, which means the presentation should show only what the student did themselves.
You can mention further directions in the conclusion, but no more than one or two sentences for 10–15 seconds.
If there is a software development, the best option is to record a short video, without sound. You should comment on the video yourself, in words. Why do I recommend video? Because in 99% of cases, at the diploma defense the program won’t run: there will be no internet, the computer will glitch out, something else will go wrong, and the demonstration will have the effect of a dud bomb: everyone was expecting something big, and nothing happened.
Interested in my opinion on any issue of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. Questions can also be asked through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan