“While I was at AAS, I attended a professional development workshop about giving effective oral presentations. The instructor was Jean-luc Doumont, author of the book Trees, Maps and Theorems: Effective Communication for Rational Minds, and an engineer who has a PhD in applied physics from Stanford. He went over how to structure your talks, how to get your message across, how to construct a good powerpoint, how to build confidence, and how to answer difficult questions. Giving effective oral presentations is something that many people, including myself, struggle with. I wanted to share some of the tips he gave; I found them extremely useful, and I am actually excited to give an oral presentation so I can put these tips into action!”