Sticking to the script - a university presentation In school, for me at least, presentations were very low-stakes affairs; you could squirm your way through them with a few giggles and a lot of reading directly off slides. At university, they started to grow in importance. During my first degree (biochemistry), one presentation that stands out in my memory for all the wrong reasons is a talk I gave on the Ebola virus. Everyone in the cohort had been dished out their respective topics, and I had arguably landed the most interesting (and certainly most topical) one. Our assignment was to go away and research the topic for a few weeks, then bring it to life for our peers via a presentation. In hindsight, this was as much an exercise in presenting information as it was about collating and distilling the wealth of scientific research around our given area. With no barometer for how to give a good presentation, I made the mistake many of us make when starting out - I wrote a script. Pac...