The Female Science Professor is thinking about seminar series. Specifically, whether attendance should be mandatory for students:
Being required to attend the departmental seminar eliminates that pesky decision-making process about whether to go to seminar or not. But then, if required to attend, you might sit there in the seminar, seething with resentment about being forced to attend rather than being trusted to make the decision to attend, and your anger at the controlling professors who are oppressing you leaves you unable to appreciate the seminars, even the ones that aren’t horrific examples of PowerPoint abuse. You are further unhinged by bitterness when you look around the room and note that quite a few faculty are missing. What is their excuse? Shouldn’t they be required to attend seminar as well? Hypocrites.
It’s a slightly tricky question. When I was in graduate school, I was required to attend two different seminar series. One of these was an ok experience, while the other was utterly miserable.
The ok one was run by a professor in the Chem department who was a pretty reasonable guy. The topics spanned a pretty wide range, and most of the talks were reasonably good. It did, however, include two of the worst talks I’ve ever heard.
One of these was just a matter of rudeness on the part of the speaker. The topic had to do with microscopy, and the speaker had been invited by a particular professor in the department, who showed up with her entire research group, and sat in the front row. The entire talk was a hyper-technical seminar about the gory details of the subject, delivered to and for the first two rows.
I say “the entire talk,” which isn’t quite fair. I didn’t stay for the whole thing. The faculty organizer, to his credit, spent the first ten or fifteen minutes making a valiant effort to re-direct the speaker to a more general audience, requesting clarifications and definitions of terms on practically every slide. When it became clear that his efforts were going for naught, he stood up and walked out. I followed him a minute or so later.
The other absolutely dreadful talk in that series was a failure of subject matter. The talk was on theoretical models of protein folding, and consisted of a forty-minute trip through the minutiae of self-consistent Hartree-Fock mumble-garble calculation methods. There were detailed discussions of numerical algorithms, analysis of test cases, inscrutable ribbon diagrams, the works.
When the speaker reached the results, the dramatic conclusion was: “Here’s the configuration we calculate. When we do the X-Ray crytallography, we get this other configuration. Our results are completely wrong. We have no idea why. Any questions?”
That may have been the biggest waste of time I was ever forced to attend. Before I became a faculty member, anyway.
The utterly miserable seminar series was run by a professor in Physics (I believe). It was scheduled in a 90-minute block at lunchtime, and overlapped by 15 minutes with a class that I wanted to take. I had to get permission from the co-organizer of the seminar to take it and duck out early, which struck me as pretty strange, given that the Standard Academic Time Unit is 50 minutes. No way would the talks run for an hour and fifteen minutes.
I had failed to reckon with the colossal ego of the primary organizer, though. His introductions of the speakers often ran for ten minutes or more, and he would interject frequently and at great length to correct misstatements or deficiencies of presentation. On one occasion, he introduced a speaker using overhead slides taken from the paper the guy was going to talk about. He basically gave a ten-minute precis of the talk we were about to hear, including showing key data graphs.
I was lucky to get to the question period during most of the seminars in that series. It didn’t help that the topic of the series was an area of physics that I don’t particularly care for, either. As I recall, the focus was pretty narrow within that field, too.
In order to get credit, we were required to attend at least three-quarters of the seminars. The morning of the last seminar of the semester, I stopped into the secretary’s office and asked “How many of these damn things have I been to?” The answer was “nine of the eleven talks so far,” and I think I was out the door before she finished the sentence.
A year or two later, the program I was in changed the requirements so as to give students a choice of which seminar series to attend. They still needed credit for two (I think), but they could pick which two they wanted from a list of four or five different subject areas. I thought that was an eminently reasonable approach to the problem, sort of splitting the difference.
Those are my seminar stories. What are yours?
I’m required to tend a departmental seminar series every week for my first two years of my PhD program. For first years it makes sense — it helps expose us to the variety of research being done at our institution, and also to some great guest lectures. But second year students have already chosen a lab, and presumably can decide (with some advice from their mentor) which talks are relevant to them and which are not. Oh well; at least there are snacks.
There is, at least in my experience, a difference between a colloquium and a seminar.
A colloquium is aimed at a general departmental level: typically first year grads in Ph.D. granting departments, and second or third year undergrads in departments that don’t offer the Ph.D. It makes sense to require first year grad students to attend such a series, as is required of Laura and was required of me when I was a grad student. (And in my later years, the fact that the colloquium was normally Friday at 3:30 with refreshments including beer afterward was a significant inducement to attend.)
A seminar series is focused on a more specialized topic: you might have one on astrophysics/space science, on particle physics, on solid-state physics, or whatever else faculty members in your department work on. Grad students concentrating in a particular area should attend the seminar series in that area, if they are in town and not engaged in an experiment they cannot interrupt. First year grad students can choose to attend or not, knowing that they are likely to not understand a significant fraction of the material. That it was labeled a seminar and not a colloquium should have been fair warning.
As I said, it’s understandable to require first year students to attend a colloquium series. It does not make sense to require attendance at a seminar series.
Faculty candidate interviews typically include a colloquium (which may be in addition to the normal colloquium series), and may or may not also include a seminar. A major reason for the colloquium is to evaluate how well the candidate can communicate with a room full of people who are not experts in his field. Many (but by no means all) of the truly awful colloquia I have attended have been faculty candidates who, as their colloquium demonstrated, had no business teaching.
I have been in departments where colloquium attendance was formally required but only sporadically enforced. The benefits of colloquium attendance span well past the first year. Which is not to say that every student should attend every colloquium, especially after the first few years. However, a department could quite reasonably have a rule that you must sign up for the colloquium class (my department had a class on the books like that when I was in grad school) X number of quarters/semesters and attend Y% of the talks to pass that term.
My department had a separate first year seminar in which all of the talks were by faculty on campus looking to hire graduate students. Attendance was allegedly mandatory but not enforced on those who had advisors already. This arrangement obviously made good sense.
Seminars in specialty areas? Attendance at those has always been something that students decide on with guidance from advisors.
I too was required to attend seminar series. I seriously hated it. It’s not that I generally dislike seminars, but all too often I was just trying to concentrate on something totally different and then sat in the seminar continuing to read papers or make a calculation. It’s been totally pointless. People just learn differently. Some get a lot out of seminars, others don’t. I personally prefer papers and discussions in small groups over seminars. Let the students learn their own way. If you think they are making a mistake, misjudging themselves, mismanaging their time or whatever, talk to them. Also, if there is a problem of the sort that too few people might be in a seminar and it could be impolite for the speaker, tell them the reason. And consider having fewer seminars.
Chad, I was once affiliated with a science/engineering department in your region of Upstate NY. You may recognize it from the description.
The “CEO” of this department strictly requires a Saturday morning seminar to be attended by all grad students, postdocs, and some faculty. Said “CEO” only shows up occassionally to impress a visiting dignitary. This seminar is largely a time for grad students to practice talks for conferences. The talks were mostly awful, too technical, and embarassing for the students presenting, and by extension, their advisors who didn’t bother to vet these talks presented to 100+ peers. The presenters were then grilled by other faculty, which was brutal to watch. Did I mention this was on Saturday morning? No snacks provided, either.
Lesson for Chad: don’t send any of your students to this department. This is just one outgrowth of its dysfunction.
My department seemed to get around the seminar attendance by a) providing lunch and b) instituting a culture that frowned upon the grabbing food and ditching the talk. This brought most flks in, but if you had actual work that kept you away, you weren’t frowned upon. Plus, since the talks were fifty percent fellow students and fifty percent distinguished guests, the audience paid attention out of solidarity to the miserable bastard giving the talk or on the off chance you would learn something.
Bad talks, naturally, were mocked back in the labs afterward.
At our institute we have a lunch seminar system much like Craig describes – you get a mediocre sandwich or pizza for enduring it at lunchitme. You earn a ridicule if you only stuff your face and leave. The overall quality of these seminars is OK so you may want to listen on a 45min technical talk unrelated to your field but it is considered rude to bolt before the end. Usually its a summary presentation on some larger project, often from invited speakers (some of which are looking for a tenure-track job or a collaboration).
The very few realy important seminars/distinguished speakers get a second-round announcement, with “make sure to attend” from the department head – in which case you may want to prepare an plausible excuse if you skip them.
Hm, my case seems completely opposite. It would be good for me if the seminars were mandatory, because then that’s a legitimate excuse for not getting any work done during that 2-hour chunk of time. Otherwise, I sometimes feel “well, that talk kinda looks interesting, but there’s this paper I should probably be working on instead…”