Mastering the Internship Presentation: A Guide to Success

Landing an internship is a significant achievement, and the final presentation is your opportunity to showcase the knowledge and skills you've acquired. This guide provides comprehensive tips to help you deliver a compelling and impactful presentation, increasing your chances of a full-time job offer.

The Internship Presentation: Your Capstone Experience

An internship presentation serves as a capstone, consolidating your experiences and insights into a well-structured slide deck. It's a final opportunity to demonstrate your learning and contributions.

Structuring Your Internship Presentation

When creating your internship experience PowerPoint presentation, it’s essential to map it out in advance. Your presentation should follow a logical flow:

Outlining Your Assignment

Begin by clearly outlining the scope of your internship assignment. What were you assigned to do? Provide a comprehensive overview of your tasks and actions during your internship. What functional area did you support, and what were your responsibilities? Senior managers are usually the primary audience for presentations like this. In any case, it’s vital to clearly outline your assignment right up front. Start your internship PowerPoint presentation with a rundown of what you worked on.

Highlighting Key Projects

Once the stage is set, it’s time to outline a key project that you worked on. These are common in many internships. This key project will be the main takeaway for your audience. A good way to make a great impression here is to share how the project helped you learn about the business. Focus on one key project, which will be the biggest takeaway for your audience. Internships benefit both sides, you and the business. By sharing what you worked on, you’ll convey how your presence helped the firm.

Read also: Presenting Webinars Effectively

Detailing Project Results and Benefits

Be specific about the success of the project. Provide details about the success of the project. The project’s results. What do you have to show for completing it? A deliverable? Supporting data. Key things you learned in completing the project. You might have boosted your teamwork skills, learned to use an analytics dashboard, and so on. If it mattered to you, it mattered to the company. How the completed project will benefit the company. Place the project in context.

Making Recommendations

Consider making a recommendation based on your project experience. As you worked on the project, you might have considered more benefits or courses of action. By making a recommendation, you can offer a powerful idea for management to consider. This idea is especially useful if you plan to seek full-time employment at the company, too.

Showcasing Your Overall Experience and Skills

The project that you just shared is a major part of your end of internship presentation. But it won’t capture everything that you’ve learned! Once you’ve shared the project, it’s a smart idea to provide a fuller account of your experiences. Focus on skills like networking and communication that you refined during the internship. After all, internships should teach more than core business skills. Share the full benefits of your experience to show how much you learned and what you enjoyed. Focus on how you benefitted from the internship. Cover highlights of what you liked best, and how you enjoyed the working environment. You can even talk (briefly) about involvement in activities outside of work. Again, don't spend a ton of time on this subject. Think of it as a way to add interest and show your appreciation, while staying true to the topic.

Expressing Gratitude

Internships are truly team efforts. Your experience is largely guided by those around you. At the beginning, you’re stepping into an unfamiliar environment. This is all set against the backdrop of your presence being only temporary. Always remember to express your gratitude to show appreciation for your internship experience. This is one of the top internship presentation ideas because it's the last impression you’ll make. Once again, be specific. Recognize key individuals who helped you with tasks or offered advice. In doing so, you certainly express your own gratitude. But you also pave the way for future interns. As you show gratitude, you express how much you gained from an internship experience. It’s the perfect way to reflect and recognize.

Delivering a Killer Presentation: Attitude and Preparation

Beyond the structure, your attitude and preparation are crucial for a successful presentation.

Read also: Crafting Webinar Presentations

Projecting Confidence and Enthusiasm

Before even beginning to address the finer points of a smooth presentation, your attitude is the first thing an audience will pick up on. If you’re stoked about what you’ve built, the audience will be as well. Speak about your product’s impact (vs technical background): If your product is improving people’s lives by reducing the amount of time it takes them to do something, focus on that! If your product is giving engineers access to better reporting tools but doesn’t have a large UI component, that’s awesome. Keeping the technical aspects of the work lighter will help you avoid the pitfall below, and come across as confident in your final product. Don’t harp on the limitations: Your team is well aware of any drawbacks the product has, and if someone really wants to know limitations (they might be considering using it) then schedule a meeting and talk in depth about it. Integrating feedback and iterating on ideas is what engineers do! Hearing someone trying to rationalize to themselves that their product is solid during a presentation leaves the audience with an uncomfortable feeling.

Anticipating and Mitigating Potential Issues

Things break - frequently. Which, as engineers, is something we know all too well about the things we’re developing. Our wifi might be slow, we might not have access to a Google account we need, or our code might break. All of which are normal occurrences during a development cycle, but too frequently we forget these things can happen during our presentations! They make us lose our cool, stop the presentation flow, and distract an audience. However, there are actions that you as a presenter can take to mitigate these risks - and improve your presentation confidence.

Avoiding Live Demos

Don’t Live Demo. If your product is still running on localhost and only you have been playing with it, recording a demo is the best route to go. There are likely some people that will disagree with me on this. However, I offer two reasons why a live demo can be difficult:

) Live demoing stops your interaction with the audience. You have to engage with and convince your audience that you’re worth paying attention to. By live demoing, you’re pulled into your computer and away from your audience. Further, there is a tendency to get lost in trying to remember all the features your product has - which can lead to awkward pauses and a jolting presentation. Which is the last thing you want during your demo!
) The bonus points aren’t worth it. We can all admit there are bonus points for live demoing - people get to see your product working live, right there. But if your product is working and released, then people can go use it on their own. If your company uses feature flags, then people can turn those on in a staging environment explore your product there. If it’s on in production, that’s even cooler, you get to say ‘go use it in production!’

This does come with one caveat, which is if your product has been in a staging environment for >2 weeks and has been tested by >10 users. This means that it has been through a decently rigorous testing cycle and has had enough time to have any major bugs be reported. I would still strongly recommend making a video, because no amount of testing can prevent the wifi from breaking.

Developing Contingency Plans

Have contingency plans. This relates to the point of live demoing, but it merits its own bullet point. You’ll feel more prepared. A strategy that I often use is the following:

Read also: Comprehensive Internship Guide

) Embed videos in the presentation. It makes for a nice flow. Not having to exit presentation view keeps the flow of the going, and allows you to keep your position in front of the audience. It also means you don’t depend on your code working in the moment.
) Have videos stored locally on your computer. If your embedded video isn’t playing quickly or is having resolution problems, going to your computer where there won’t be bandwidth limitations on playback is an excellent option. It stops the flow a little bit, but everyone knows what’s going on, and you can move back in front of the audience quickly enough. This is probably the most secure option as you don’t depend on the wifi or your code working.
) Be prepared to live demo. If your videos aren’t playing but wifi is still working, live demoing is another option. It’s riskier, but it’ll look better to go right to a live demo than to stumble around for what to do next.

Having these options gives me a mental checklist of what to do in multiple situations where something has gone wrong. You look better as a presenter having fall-backs and contingency plans as opposed to stumbling and asking to be shuffled in the presentation order.

Knowing Your Material and Delivering Concisely

Nothing is worse than a slide with three bullet points that takes three minutes for a presenter to walk through. Sure - you’re demonstrating how much you know, but it’s a reasonable bet that you’ve wandered off what the bullets are saying and gone into so much detail that you’ve lost a decent portion of your audience. Ultimately, the engineers in the audience are people too and while we understand the technical details, we definitely don’t understand them as well as you do. Doing a couple key things as a presenter will help with this problem:

Focusing on Impact over Technical Details

Don’t mention the functional requirements in their full detail. To you, these were extremely important, and likely shaped how you built your product. However, changing language is often helpful for non-technical audience members. Instead of saying ‘reducing a latency of 2 seconds to a latency of .5 seconds,’ frame it as ‘reducing load times to a quarter of what they are now’ or some such. Even better, frame things from a perspective of ‘this was the problem’ - it provides audience members with direct knowledge of what was going wrong. And maybe even include a video of the old way of doing things. Nothing hits home quite like a video and you clearly mentioning the problems.

Using Bullet Points Effectively

Bullet point tips. We all use them, but there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to use your bullet point slides.

) Dense bullet points that fill up an entire slide can lose an audience. Especially if it becomes clear you are just trying to run through them or are working exclusively off the bullet points. Plus, a wall of text is, in general, daunting for an audience member to take in and absorb in the short amount of time you have to present that slide.
) Sparse bullet points with too much talk can lose an audience. If you have three short bullet points but spend three minutes explaining that entire slide, I can guarantee the audience absorbed maybe 50% of what you mentioned in that time. This is because they don’t have any visual cues for what you are speaking about.
) Know your bullet points. Please do this. If you don’t - you have to read from your slides. And that is bad for all of the reasons you already know about presenting. A short list is: you lose your flow, you lose your focus, your audience knows you are reading, etc, etc.

Utilizing an Agenda Slide

Use an Agenda slide. You may only have one product to present, but an agenda slide centers both yourself and your audience before you jump into the presentation. If you’re feeling crazy, go ahead, throw a conclusion slide in there. That can be a great place to summarize any really cool points of what you did and leave your audience with a good feeling at the end. It definitely helps with bringing closure to the presentation. Remember the old adage of: tell your audience what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them what you just said.

Additional Tips for a Polished Presentation

Videos: Videos are great. But if you have a video and don’t know what’s happening in that video, you become an audience member. As a presenter, you are leading the audience, and it is your job to know where your video is going next. Videos are great because you have the ability to determine what the audience sees and what they don’t. You can pick the highlights and ensure you mention them as the video is playing. This is a tried and true technique, and done well looks polished and professional.
Stick to the highlights: Pick the most fun technical challenges you tackled without getting mired down in the details, and speak a bit about those. Talk about the technologies you used and any new technologies you used/learned. Mention any cool feedback you’ve received from people using your product. All of these things will help your presentation go smoothly and be digestible for your audience, regardless of background!
Practice! Run through it once. Grab a conference room with a TV, get a teammate to come with you, and start a Zoom meeting. You get the experience of connecting your laptop screen to Zoom, and moving into a presentation smoothly. Further, you can begin to learn the pacing of the presentation you’ve created and how it will come across to an audience. Having a teammate there gives a touchpoint for feedback after you’ve finished.
Slow down: I know you’ve already heard it, but it bears repeating. You’ll either run out of breath or the audience will run out of focus.
Gifs: if you’re feeling funky :P Plus, engineers do love their gifs. Bear in mind your timing - a badly placed gif can be unfortunate.
Dress professionally: In a group of 8 interns that were presenting, only 1 was wearing a suit and tie. I understand it’s hot as balls out and it's mid-summer, but it won’t kill you to actually look professional for 10 minutes. One kid actually showed up wearing a short-sleeve button down. What kind of message are you trying send? That you were dressed by your mom?
Stand up while presenting: This year presentations were held round-table style in a conference room and out of the 8 presenters only 1 thought to stand up. It really makes all the difference. Your voice projects more and demands the attention of the audience.
Be concise: Can you express the main point on any given slide in 20 words or less? If not revise. People these days have the attention span of a gnat hopped up on bath salts.
Be prepared for questions: Hopefully, you’ve made some insightful points during your presentation and your audience has been kept awake long enough to ask questions. If no one asks questions, don’t take it personally. If they do and you don’t know the answer or are out of time, be sure to follow up after.
Avoid complaints: Don’t pepper your presentation with complaints about working long hours or working on weekends. You had a job for the summer and we expect that you get it done, even if it means GASP staying past 6. If you want a 40-hour work week, I think the Gap is still hiring.
Don't read from the slides: This is presenting 101. I get that you’re nervous, but the slides are there for reference not as a script to be read verbatim. Reading from the slides makes it seem like you don’t know your stuff and you’ll likely sound like you have Voice Immodulation syndrome and that's just no fun for everyone involved.
Pace yourself: We usually give our interns about 10 minutes, so there’s a tendency to rush through. Consciously slow down your speech, remember to breathe and pause every now and then to let the audience digest the content.
Avoid fidgeting: Holding things like pens or extra papers just to have something to do with your hands is distracting. I’d say its better to put your hands in your pockets then waving around your hands like maniac.

The Q&A Session: A Critical Opportunity

Q&A is when the offer decisions are made. I’ve seen interns nail their presentations and bomb the Q&A to not get an offer, or give an awful presentation with some really bad ideas, but maintain their composure and give thoughtful responses to difficult questions to resurrect an offer that was half dead and buried. Practice answering all kinds of questions and remember that “I do not know, but will find out” is a perfectly acceptable answer. But do find out and let them know. The “90% of success is showing up” in the business context is the follow-through to do what you say you will do and be accountable. Set up your appendix in an organized way that is easy to read and navigate during Q&A. This is how you turn a “gotcha” question into an “oh shit, they already thought of that” reaction. Every company has a rule of thumb for how long your appendix should be compared to the deck itself and what they want to see in there. In general, I’ve seen it work out to 3-5 appendix/backup slides for every main deck slide. If you reference something that isn’t common company knowledge, you need to have it in your appendix so if you get asked a question about it, can flip to it for more details.

Leveraging Resources for Visual Appeal

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