It’s seminar week over at Female Science Professor, and today she’s polling her readers as to the best day and time for seminars.
Our departmental colloquia are generally held on Thursdays at lunchtime. We provide pizza and soda as an enticement for students (which doesn’t work as well as you might think), and have the talks start about half an hour after the food arrives, in hopes that people will mostly have finished eating.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way…
My first year or so here, we had colloquia on Fridays. This turned out to be a gigantic pain in the ass, both because it was hard to get students to show up for anything on Fridays, and also because many academics teach on a M-W-F schedule, and can’t easily travel to give a Friday talk.
When I drew the short straw to be colloquium organizer, I started letting the day of the week float, scheduling talks for whatever day was most convenient for the speaker. I quickly found that attendance roughly doubled if we scheduled a talk for any day other than Friday, and we moved to Thursday as a default day.
Then, the college changed the daily schedule, adding a new MWF class block, at lunchtime. This screwed everything up– now, there were classes scheduled at lunchtime MWF, so faculty would be teaching classes, and students taking classes in those blocks that had been used for some seminars and colloquia. On top of that, Tuesdays at lunchtime were quickly snapped up as the time for general faculty meetings. There are only a few of these in any given term, but of course they’re not scheduled in advance, so Tuesdays were out.
As a result, pretty much every department on campus with a regular seminar or colloquium series has their talks scheduled for Thursdays at lunchtime. This directly undermines the much hyped push for “interdisciplinarity,” because whenever we invite, say, a biophysicist to talk about interdiscinplinary work, they’re scheduled directly opposite the biology department’s colloquium, so no biologists can make it.
You might think that a sensible solution would be to move the time of the seminar to, say, later in the afternoon, after most of the class blocks end. This was the rule when I was a student– colloquium talks were mostly at 4:30– and the same has been true most of the places I’ve given talks.
Whenever I suggest this, though, people look at me like I have three heads. There’s something in the local culture that says that seminars and meetings can only be held during the common lunch hour, and any attempt to change that is met with huge resistance.
So, our colloquia are on Thursdays, in the lunch hour, along with every other science and engineering department.
If I had my druthers, I’d do seminars later in the afternoon and earlier in the week– Mondays at 4 would be good. Putting the seminar at the end of the day removes the problem of motivating people to work after the talk, and putting it on Monday lets you ease into the week with a short day.
When would your ideal seminar time be, and when is your seminar actually held?
Our seminars were (probably still are) on Thursdays at 4pm. Which allowed us also to attend (if interested in a particular topic) Entomology seminars on Mondays at 10:30am and Genetics seminars on Mondays at 1:30pm. If we got a really Big Name speaker for Thursday, we could usually get that person to give a second talk – to grad students only – during Friday lunch in the student room, no faculty allowed.
> We provide pizza and soda as an enticement for students
> (which doesn’t work as well as you might think)
In order for this strategy to work one has to do some simple preparation steps:
1) Cut student’s stipend in order to keep them always hungry (do not overact though!)
2) Explain that if hunrgy students will want to leave the college, something bad will happen to them. I am pretty much sure that the guy of your size can be convincing enough.
Best regards and good luck,
Dmitry.
Since I’m out of academia, I have to say that seminars are probably best done on Monday’s or Tuesdays at 10AM. Is it s regular class time – yep, and if you want students to come, you need to make the seminar as much like a regular class as possible.
Our seminars are Thursdays at 4 pm. There really is no ideal time in our schedule since there are blocks being used at all times. I’ve found that seminar attendance really increases if students get some kind of credit for going. The food isn’t enough of a draw when they are making decisions about how to best spend their limited time.
In Penn’s math department, there are many seminar series; they generally meet at 4 or 4:30. See our departmental calendar. 4 is, I think, the “default” time, but sometimes there are classes that meet from 3 to 4:20, so if that creates a conflict for a given seminar it gets pushed back to 4:30.
The exceptions to this are easily explained:
– the Galois seminar meets at 3:15 on Fridays. There are less classes scheduled here on Fridays, so that doesn’t create a conflict with classes, and people want to go home. Why 3:15 and not 3:00? Because at 3 each afternoon tea, coffee, and cookies are placed out in the departmental lounge, and people want time to enjoy them.
– the applied math colloquium meets at 2:00 on Fridays; this is not actually part of the math department, but part of an interdisciplinary group, so they don’t obey the math department’s cultural norm.
– the “pizza seminar” (grad students only, and not listed on the public calendar) is Fridays at noon. I am convinced that this is the department’s way of getting us grad students to come to campus on Fridays, since in many cases we would have no other on-campus obligation on Fridays. (Many classes here are M-W or T-R.) As for why it’s at noon, well, can you name a better time for lunch?
– there are various “reading seminars” that are basically like classes, and these tend to meet at the times which are more usual for classes.
Generally our seminars seem to be well-attended, but I don’t really have a basis for comparison. The attendance by grad students may be due to a departmental rule that states that grad students beyond the first year should regularly attend at least one of the seminar series; however, I’m not sure if this rule is actually enforced.
Departmental colloquium was Monday afternoon, 4:30 I think. Coffee and cookies beforehand — pizza would have never been in the budget. Attendance was supposedly mandatory for grad students — you were required to sign up for it in the schedule, for 1 credit.
No such beast when I was an undergrad. Very small department.
At York, there is an universal agreement not to schedule any lectures Wednesday afternoon to allow for weekly sports events. Of course, the physics department jumps on that and schedules the colloquia Wednesday early afternoon. The actual time seems to migrate a little, but it is normally the hour after any lectures have to have finished. They are never required (unless your advisor advises otherwise), and tend to be targeted only at certain research groups, so probably not quite the same as you are talking about.
The Institute of Physics often does general interest talks on Monday evenings. Normally around 6, with wine beforehand. They are more designed to draw people in from outside the university though.
Where I am, the physics colloquium is at your dream time, Mondays at 4, with light refreshments beforehand. The seminar series I attend is usually Wednesdays at 3:10, and we have a student lunchtime talk series Fridays at 12:10. (Why the :10 in the last two? Because classes here start at 10 minutes after the hour and run up until the hour.)
In my grad school department, 3:30 was the default time for talks. As I mentioned in a previous thread, the colloquium was on Friday, with refreshments including beer served afterward. The plasma physics seminar was on Tuesdays. There was also a solid-state seminar; I don’t recall whether that was Mondays or Wednesdays.
Locally, the problem with a late afternoon talk is that a lot of people have to leave immediately afterwards, pick up the kids from soccer practice, catch the van pool, etc.
Since we have a lunch time talk 3 days a week, moving the colloquium is really out of the question.
To solve the every-department-scheduled-simultaneously problem, you should talk to the opposing department and get the event advertised as a “Special Joint Physics/Linguistics Colloquium” or whatever, inviting both departments en masse.
That said, I’m a fan of the 4:15 time slot.
“Special Joint Physics/Linguistics Colloquium” — Protons and Pronouns, Together Again at Last.
(1) Do not hold a Colloquium right after lunch. When the lights go down to show the transparencies/slides/video, everybody undergoes state transition to siesta.
(2) Do not hold a Colloquium right before lunch. Nobody pays any attention to me; they are just daydreaming about the foods, adult beverages, and desserts of their choice.
(3) Do hold a Colloquium during lunch, and provide the food and cookies and coffee just before the introductions. Write this into the grant.
(4) Weekends? Are you kidding? Excuse me, I have a life.
Worst time ever: 8 AM. My adviser said he never made it to any talks, including his own.