{"id":2632,"date":"2008-05-21T09:29:18","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T09:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/21\/thank-you-for-listening\/"},"modified":"2008-05-21T09:29:18","modified_gmt":"2008-05-21T09:29:18","slug":"thank-you-for-listening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/21\/thank-you-for-listening\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank You for Listening"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Female Science Professor is musing about thank-yous at thesis defenses<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

When I was in grad school, a prominent faculty member (who was department chair near the end of my grad years) made it known that he hated the “thank you” part of the thesis defense and strongly discouraged students from including any sort of personal thank you in their talk. If someone really wanted to, they could have a very brief and professional acknowledgment at the end of their talk (not the beginning). His reasoning was that the defense is an exam<\/a>, and it is not the place for a long acknowledgment of the emotional and other support provided by significant others, relatives, pets, or faculty. Most students respected his wishes and confined their acknowledgments to the thesis document or to giving a speech at a party or other social occasion to celebrate a successful defense.<\/p>\n

More typically, the thesis defenses I have seen involve acknowledgments — some at the beginning, but more commonly at the end. I am not as extreme as my former professor, but I am glad when this part of the talk is short. It’s always weird to listen to a long emotional thank you to the spouse and dog, and then go straight from that into exam mode.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am completely baffled by the idea of having a long and emotional acknowledgment section in a thesis defense. In the thesis, sure– mine runs two pages (space-and-a-half)– but not in the talk. That’d just be freaky.<\/p>\n

But then, I’m somewhat baffled by the idea of acknowledgments in talks generally. Not recognizing the contributions of co-authors and funding agencies– that, you have to do– but having a separate slide for noting all the people who helped out with the project at one time or another.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is extremely common among the students I see giving talks, along with a “References” slide including a list of bibliographic citations in eight-point font. I’ve always wondered where these come from, because I had really never seen either before getting here.<\/p>\n

Standard practice in my little corner of physics is to list co-authors and funding agencies on the title slide, and acknowledge them up front. I start nearly all of my talks off with a boilerplate “No experimental physics project succeeds without the cooperative effort of many people, and here are the students who have contributed to this over the years…” Then you go into the body of the talk, and end with a summary\/ conclusions slide.<\/p>\n

This seems to be fairly common among physicists generally, though I do sometimes see it reversed, with a group photo or something toward the end. <\/p>\n

I’m always faintly annoyed by the “References\/ Acknowledgments” ending, though. For one thing, putting up a slide with a list of references serves no purpose that I can see– in order to fit on screen, the citations need to be in a microscopic font, and the slide is usually throw up for about as long as it takes the speaker to say “Here are some references…” <\/p>\n

Use that three seconds for something else. I don’t need to see that you’ve pored through the library, or at least the bibliography of the thesis of the previous student on the project. If you took specific ideas or figures from other people, acknowledge those on the slides where they appear, in a font big enough for people to read, and skip the rest.<\/p>\n

And ending with a “Thanks to Bob for playing Frisbee with me on nice days…” slide just distracts everybody from what you were talking about. I’ve seen too many talks where students spent more time thanking faculty, staff, and labmates than they spent explaining their data slides. Don’t waste my time as an audience member, particularly not at the end of the talk.<\/p>\n

If you want to acknowledge other people (and you better), do that at the beginning. End your talk with a summary of your key results, and leave the summary up<\/strong> during the question period. It helps remind people what you accomplished in your research, and provides a hook for questions, sparing us all the awkward silence after the session chair says “any questions?” while people try to remember what the hell the talk was about.<\/p>\n

I suspect that this is a partly a disciplinary issue, like all the biologists who keep insisting that lab reports must<\/strong> be written in the passive voice. The chem and bio students I see talking uniformly have the References and Acknowledgments at the end of their talks, while only some of the physics students do this (and not twice, if they work for me…).<\/p>\n

As far as I’m concerned, though, the only thing worse than ending with a list of labmates and funding agencies is ending with an otherwise blank slide headed “Any Questions?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Female Science Professor is musing about thank-yous at thesis defenses: When I was in grad school, a prominent faculty member (who was department chair near the end of my grad years) made it known that he hated the “thank you” part of the thesis defense and strongly discouraged students from including any sort of… Continue reading Thank You for Listening<\/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-2632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632","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=2632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}