A comment on the earlier poll asked about regular series of departmental talks, which the author called a department seminar. We have such a series of talks, bringing in roughly one outside speaker per week, but we call it a colloquium. This calls for a poll to settle the question:
If you have a particular reason for preferring one or the other, please feel free to explain it in comments.
In a department of medium-large size, colloquium is the weekly event aimed at the entire department. Seminars are the weekly events aimed at AMO people, CM people, astrophysicists, high energy folks, etc. Given Union’s size, I imagine all talks given there are colloquia.
I’m a grad student at a rich university, which means I’m poor but the food they serve at seminars is good.
I used the word “seminar” because I was thinking of talks in front of a particular group (particle physics, for instance) rather than a whole department. The latter I would call a “colloquium”. So I agree with fizzchick above.
(I feel like this precise poll has come up before on some physics blog, possibly even this very one. But I guess that’s the nature of the internet; all this has happened before and all this will happen again.)
In medical schools, the talks given by speakers invited from other institutions–either faculty or post-docs who are faculty job candidates–are always called seminars.
Ditto fizzchick at #1.
Every week my department holds a colloquium. However, we grad students also hold our own gathering with a speaker (less coffee, more beer) and we call it Grad Seminar.
So my answer is both.
I assume this is highly field dependent. This is my polite way of saying I’ve never heard of anyone outside of physics call a seminar a colloquium.
The more important question is what KIND of free food. At undergrad the physicists could be counted on for cheese and crackers, as well as a vegetable plate. Sometimes wine was served. The chemists tended to go for sweets and occasionally beer.
My experience is identical to fizzchick’s: the colloquium is aimed at the entire department, seminars are more specialized talks aimed at subsets of the department. Speakers for both types may or may not be from out of town, depending in part on who’s visiting that week. Also, there will generally be food available before colloquium (no alcohol, because nobody is checking whether everyone in the room is 21 or older, but they do have cheese, crackers, fruits, vegetables, and sweets) but not for seminars.
Agree on the whole dept => colloquium and specialty => seminar usage in larger departments. This convention would suggest that at liberal arts schools like Union it should be called a colloquium. But, here at Bucknell (where our host once gave a talk) we have a Faculty Colloquium, that is interdisciplinary, and we have traditionally referred to our weekly department talk as a “seminar”. So the general => colloquium and specific => seminar is maintained, but shifted.