March 21, 2024

#113. TJ Schaid on becoming a trauma surgeon and presenter

37 minutes

We know that presentations are used across all kinds of industries but did you know they’re important in the medical world as well??

General surgery resident physician TJ Schaid joins the ‘cast to discuss his experience presenting research at various conferences around the world throughout his residency. Turns out, these medical presentations can play a big part of any surgeon’s journey!

From presenting dense data within a handful of slides (or clicks) to challenging existing practices, TJ offers so much insight in how to present to a niche group of experts—as an expert himself, of course.

This is an episode for: presentation designers, aspiring speakers and startups in the science and medical field.

What's in the Spice Cabinet??

Fave movie??

Good Will Hunting—how do you like them apples?

TJ’s operating Pandora station?

ODESZA radio

Walkout song??

Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train

Any advice to fellow and future presenters?

One thing I didn't mention that was really helpful for me during during my talks is to frequently reorient the audience when you're presenting pretty dense stuff. So when you throw up a slide, and you've got a bunch of data on a slide, yeah, they might understand the graph, they might understand the data. But the WHY it matters if you can, throughout the presentation, just a statement here and there, after these data. And multiple times, maybe four or five times, you say, “Okay, and now remember, we talked about this problem, you know, in the background earlier on, this is why this matters.” Keeping them reoriented, even these people that see data and numbers and science and experiments and know medicine, helping reorient them to the point of the data throughout the presentation, not just waiting to the conclusion, I find very helpful.

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