Janet posted a few days ago about asking questions of grad students in seminars and journal clubs and so on. This is part of a larger conversation that I’m too lazy to collect links to– Janet has them– about whether grad students should show solidarity with their fellows and refrain from asking tough questions of each other in public.
It’s an interesting question, and the sort of thing I would ordinarily be all over, but my graduate experience was idiosyncratic enough that I don’t think I can say anything that would generalize well. I was officially a student in the Chemical Physics Program at the University of Maryland, but my lab work was done in Bill Phillips’s group at NIST, where I was the only grad student. As a result, I got a fair bit of experience speaking in public at conferences and so on, but didn’t have a great deal of experience interacting with other grad students at departmental seminars and the like.
I can say, though, that being at NIST has left me with a terror of the phrase “Before you leave that slide…” That was one of Bill’s signature phrases to visiting speakers, and almost always prefaced a question I would have no idea how to answer.
I used to hear that a lot when giving practice talks to the group, and even more at a few events that were basically dissertation defense practice sessions. I heard even more of it when people from outside the group would come to give seminars or colloquia to the group.
It was always really intimidating, as a student, because Bill is amazingly smart and has a gold medal to prove it. Those were some brutal questions, and I saw some very distinguished speakers fumble and flouder in the wake of “Before you leave that slide…” questions. Bill remains the only person ever to call me on a slide where the error bars were too big… I really had no idea what to say to that, but now I’m keenly aware of the difference between “standard deviation” and “standard error,” and the rule you can use to tell within seconds whether a speaker has confused them.
One thing, though– on the few occasions while I was at NIST and spoke at conferences where Bill was in the audience, I never heard those words. And even at my thesis defense, he hardly asked any questions (unlike the outside-the-program representative, who blew up when he thought I misused the word “ballistic”). I got quite the grilling during practice talks, but that was by way of preparation– and, by the way, the advice that came out of those practice talks was always excellent. In public, outside the group, Bill wasn’t about to make anybody working for him look bad.
So, to the extent that I have anything to offer on the question of whether grad students should ask or be asked hard questions, that’s probably it: Inside the group, for practice, yes. Outside the group, in public venues, no.
Also, for the record, I did go back to NIST once to give a seminar as an outside speaker, and I got the full treatment. I knew what I was headed for, though, and prepared accordingly– I brought the slides for the 20-minute version of my talk, and we ended up calling it at an hour and a half, with two slides to go.
I knew my stuff inside and out, though, and having been prepared for it, I managed to field all the “Before you leave that slide…” questions reasonably well. And because of that, it was actually about the most fun I’ve ever had giving a seminar talk.
Though if you know of some hard questions you can answer, that will make you look good, it’s not a bad idea to have a few plants in the audience…
Though if you know of some hard questions you can answer, that will make you look good, it’s not a bad idea to have a few plants in the audience…
That’s not a terrible idea.
I’ve always heard that basic idea in the form of advice, as in “It’s a good idea to leave a couple of obvious things unexplained in the talk, so that people will ask about them in the question period.”
There’s a fine line, though, in that if you leave too many gaps, you look like an idiot. Finding the exact right balance is tricky.
When I was a grad student, it was considered to be in poor taste for grad students to ask questions at thesis defenses. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw it happen. I was tempted a few times but kept my mouth shut.
1) what you are saying seems pretty spot-on to me (I particularly like that you draw the distinction between ‘in public’ and ‘in private’)
2) care to educate us?
I’ve taken stats, and vaguely remember when standard deviation is appropriate and standard error is appropriate… but I could always use a refesher
I often asked questions at defenses of my grad school colleagues. But, I asked questions about things we have already talked about in person beforehand so I knew they could hit the answer out of the ballpark with gusto and a smile. It was never pre-arranged with them, I never asked obvious softballs, but I had the inside info that I hit on their strong points. This also took time away from other potential questioners, e.g., the invariably tough one from Roger Powell (who has a great sense of what your weakest point is), an excruciatingly long and tangential question by Jim Gilliam, or the question on “how it relates to mockingbirds” by Tom Quay. Thus, without planning it this way, I helped my colleagues look good in the Q&A sessions of their defenses and helped them get over the nervousness.
It took me until I was out of grad school to realize that questions like “Why did you do X?” were not necessarily meant as hostile challenges. That may have been due to some tough questioning but probably is more a reflection on my confidence level at the time.
Re error bars, this page has some good rules of thumb:
http://www.graphpad.com/library/BiostatsSimple/article_55.htm
I’m not sure what rule of thumb lets you tell the differences between SD and SEM just by looking though, at least not unless you know something about n or significance.
At engineering conferences and symposia, the hard questions almost always come from the practicing engineers, rather than the grad students or the professors.
In general, among engineers, I see the following trends:
Grad student: “Hey, that’s cool– how’d you do that? Did you think of this?”
Professor: Either that, or occasionally, “My way works better, and I will now try to embarass you.” (The latter often need to be dragged away from the microphone. Physically.)
Practitioner: “What the hell good is that?! It doesn’t address this, or that, or the other bottleneck….”
Sometimes that’s fair. Sometimes it’s not. Some of these papers and presentations are obviously blue-sky, ain’t-that-cool techniques that are destined for academic curiosity and extreme niche applications, and everyone except the inquisitor knows that. Sometimes the grad student kids himself that he just did industry a huge favor. Either way, a disgruntled, bitter, 63 year old engineer in suspenders and a beard limping his way up to the microphone is usually not a good thing.
Evolution is a hoot… if you are one of the survivors.
1) Have everybody agree with you, or
2) Pin everybody in the killing jar.
The first obtains stable employment, the second obtains prizes (or charred remains. Show some cajones). Do local left and right shoes vacuum free fall identically? Somebody should look.
You are conflating two different things.
First, as to the question of whether a mentor/supervisor should ask questions of her own trainee, I absolutely agree that other than at an internal “prep” talk, trainees should be left to their own devices in public contexts: neither asked questions, nor rescued from questions asked by others.
Second, as to the question whether grad students should be asked “hard” questions at all in public contexts, you’ve got this totally wrong.
Grad students are developing scientists, and they are responsible for the content of what they talk about. If someone in the audience has a cogent question that is apropos of what the student says, the ethics and practicalities of science demand that they question be asked.
The idea that “hard” questions shouldn’t be asked of trainees is pernicious and destructive both of the development of the trainee and the vibrancy of the scientific enterprise. It is not “nice” to leave questions unasked; it is actually cruel and selfish.
And since you’re too lazy to post links to the trainees who started this fucking discussion, here you go:
http://biochemgradstudent.blogspot.com/2008/03/solidarity.html
http://drjekyllandmrshyde.blogspot.com/
I once had a fellow grad student ask me a few questions about some work I had done at the Cornell nanofabrication lab, and there was a fairly hard-core chemistry question for which I did not have an answer. I gave an atomic physics seminar on the topic a few days later, and he asked the same damn question. I was not pleased.
——
I got to sit next to Bill at a workshop a few weeks back, and after only a few talks he had everyone conditioned to turn to where he was sitting once the talk concluded. He always had questions, and damn good ones. (I’m pretty sure most of the audience expected this, so it may have simply been a matter of remembering where he was sitting, rather than any kind of Pavlovian conditioning)
We had a Bill Phillips type in my grad school department. My advice to colleagues going there to give a seminar: “Don’t worry if Prof. X asks questions. Worry if he stops asking questions.”
To answer comment #4: The probable meaning here (unfortunately it varies depending on your discipline or who your stats teachers were or both) is that standard deviation is a measure of the typical variation in your data, while standard error is a measure of your uncertainty about the mean of the population. The standard error is thus 1/sqrt(n) of the std. dev.