For @jehknee_fur and any other grad student planning and running your own Zoom thesis/dissertation defense:

1) A Pro account was necessary for hosting and breakout room control. I requested access through my institution's site license: https://www.hawaii.edu/sitelic/zoom/ 

2) invites:
2a) I set up a pre-reg/"will email you info"/waiting room system because I experienced an zoom bombing consisting of infant porn and NEVER want that to happen to anyone. The extra layers of filtering reduced participation but gave me peace of mind.

2b) While Zoom allows you to register participants directly, the google forms pre-reg approach provided a respondent spreadsheet - useful for sending updates and sharing recording info for people who had to leave early, had a bad connection, or ended up missing the event.

3) PRACTICE. Multiple times. First run through with my partner and friends was really bad but my contacts provided solid suggestions on making the content more accessible, and provided some clutch advice like

4) You *CAN* use presenter mode in Zoom. Just go to "Share Screen", click on the "Advanced" tab and select "Portion of screen." You can see your notes, but remote participants cannot.

5) Advice from a friend: Pre-assign a breakout room for your committee deliberations. It will be hard to scroll down the participant list and find them on the spot. (You need a Pro account) https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360032752671-Pre-assigning-participants-to-breakout-rooms

6) Assign a tech savvy co-host (or 2), and do a technical run-through. The awesome @sara_kahanamoku (based at UC Berkeley mind you!) took over hosting, letting people in from the waiting room so I wouldn't be interrupted by notifications.

7) Of course, find stable internet in a safe space (wrt COVID): I defended from an empty room on campus (doors open for circulation). It also helped me to stand up and get in the right headspace, like I'm *actually* defending. (pau)

One more: With no laser pointer, I put a lot of time into getting my animations right to highlight elements of my graphs/figures. People seemed to *really* like that. Tweaking all that was brutal but now seems worth it. Maybe because focus is on slides vs slides+person.