By now, you’ve probably heard of the importance of (and maybe even devised and practiced) an elevator pitch. But given that so much of cell biology is visual, I think the best response to the question of “what do you work on?” is “would you like to see a 10-second video?”
Much like the pocket props that Marc Kuchner advocates carrying around, introducing your science with pictures or a movie seems to help your audience engage with your project. Though it’s particularly useful at conferences, there’s really no reason not to have a tiny “slide deck” of a few pictures and videos ready to go at all times. You can use it for everything from showing a single picture as you’re giving a 2-sentence summary of your project to a more in-depth 5-minute mini-talk. However, the strategy will backfire if you make your audience wait more than a few seconds to see it – certainly not enough time to pull out your laptop and boot it up.
Fortunately, many us are constantly carrying the perfect tool for these multimedia elevator pitches—a smartphone. While you can certainly load an existing presentation into the mobile version of Keynote or Powerpoint, I find this overkill, and the software is a bit cumbersome and slow for me.
Instead, you can simply make a photo album containing selected images of your research and add a widget to your homescreen so you can access it with a single touch. I’ll describe how to do this with Android, but the process should be similar for iOS.
Step 1. Get your slides together
It’s nice to have labels and titles, but remember that your phone screen is tiny. I actually took screengrabs of areas of an existing poster, designed for viewing at a distance anyway, and saved them as .png or .jpg. You can also include videos in a format your phone can play—see below. I think it’s reasonable to have 10 or 12 pictures and movies, but the fewer you have, the easier and faster it will be to navigate. Also, no one wants to feel that by asking a simple question they’ve unknowingly committed to watching an hour-long seminar, so keep it short for the sake of your audience as well as yourself.
Step 2. Install apps to play videos and reorganize your file system
I needed to install VLC to enable Android to play .avi files, and also a file manager so that I could make a special folder for the slide deck (Astro worked well for me). You definitely want to avoid showing potential collaborators your entire camera roll!
Step 3. Move the files
Using Astro, I navigated to the “Pictures” folder in my file system and made a new folder for my research there, alongside existing ones made by the system (Screenshots) and apps (i.e., Twitter). In my case, I emailed 5-10 pictures and videos to myself and downloaded them to my phone’s memory, so I simply had to copy and paste from the “Downloads” folder. Of course, you could also use Dropbox or something similar. Note that the order in which you copy them is going to be the order they will appear in the slide show.
Step 4. Add a widget to your homescreen
In Android, long-press on your wallpaper and select “Widgets,” then pick up and position the “Photo Gallery.” You’ll then be prompted to “Choose images.” Pick the option to “Choose an album.” The folder you made in step 3 should now be one of the options.
Do you have an alternate strategy for incorporating images and movies into your elevator pitch? Let us know in the comments!
About the Author:
Jessica Polka is director of ASAPbio, a biologist-driven nonprofit working to improve life sciences communication. She is also a visiting scholar at the Whitehead Institute and a member of ASCB's public policy committee.
