{"id":3144,"date":"2008-11-12T08:56:58","date_gmt":"2008-11-12T08:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/12\/seminar-series-threat-or-menac\/"},"modified":"2008-11-12T08:56:58","modified_gmt":"2008-11-12T08:56:58","slug":"seminar-series-threat-or-menac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/12\/seminar-series-threat-or-menac\/","title":{"rendered":"Seminar Series: Threat or Menace?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Female Science Professor is thinking about seminar series. Specifically, whether attendance should be mandatory for students<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?”<\/p>\n

That may have been the biggest waste of time I was ever forced to attend. Before I became a faculty member, anyway.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Those are my seminar stories. What are yours?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading Seminar Series: Threat or Menace?<\/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-3144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144","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=3144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}