{"id":2213,"date":"2008-01-23T11:33:37","date_gmt":"2008-01-23T11:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/23\/dorky-poll-seminars-from-hell\/"},"modified":"2008-01-23T11:33:37","modified_gmt":"2008-01-23T11:33:37","slug":"dorky-poll-seminars-from-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/23\/dorky-poll-seminars-from-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorky Poll: Seminars from Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Biocurious, Phillip has a post on the generic science seminar outline<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

1. Introduction of Esteemed Speaker by Local Professor with the largest overlap in research interests. Enumeration of every award Esteemed Speaker has ever garnered is standard issue, and if Local Professor and Esteemed Speaker know each other, humorous story from “well, not THAT long ago” is recounted, though chances are you probably had to be there (unless it involves breaking obscenely expensive equipment, in which case everyone has a good laugh).<\/p>\n

2. Esteemed Speaker takes over, and begins with a bunch of overly broad introductory slides. Naive audience members might think cancer was about to be cured, or a theory of everything (or at least, everything the speaker is interested in) is near discovery.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s not applicable to every seminar– I have fond memories of the Atomic Physics colloquia at NIST, which were about as far from the unchallenged and uninformative talks that Phillip describes (I continue to have a deep fear of Bill Phillips’s signature “Before you leave that slide…” which was ineivtably a prelude to a question I couldn’t answer). The basic elements should certainly be familiar to anybody who has spent time in academic science, though.<\/p>\n

(Via Phillip, YoungFemaleScientist is also down on seminars<\/a>, though not in a way I agree with.)<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the audience participation part of the program:<\/p>\n

\n

What’s the single worst example of misbehavior by a seminar speaker or introducer that you’ve seen?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s tough to narrow it down to just one, but my answer is below the fold.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I saw lots of egregiously stupid things done in seminars while I was in graduate school– a speaker giving a talk that was so hyper-specific that the seminar organizer walked out in disgust, a speaker whose talk amounted to forty-five minutes of technical discussion of a calculation followed by “…and it gives the wrong answer. We don’t know why. Questions?”, an introducer offering a prayer for the soul of Carl Sagan, a ten-minute introduction of the person giving the introduction of the speaker– but the kicker was probably in one of the required seminar series for my program at Maryland, in which the person introducing the speaker gave his talk for him.<\/p>\n

When I say that, I don’t mean that the introducer gave a short summary that spoiled the main point of the talk. I mean that he gave the talk for the speaker– he brought his own overheads<\/strong>, put up a copy of the key graph of the presentation to come, and explained all the important features of the graph. It was truly astonishing– when he finally stood up to speak, the speaker had a look on his face like “Dude, WTF?”<\/p>\n

So what’s the worst thing you’ve seen done at a seminar or colloquium?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Biocurious, Phillip has a post on the generic science seminar outline: 1. Introduction of Esteemed Speaker by Local Professor with the largest overlap in research interests. Enumeration of every award Esteemed Speaker has ever garnered is standard issue, and if Local Professor and Esteemed Speaker know each other, humorous story from “well, not… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Seminars from Hell<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}