{"id":3154,"date":"2008-11-14T08:37:37","date_gmt":"2008-11-14T08:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/14\/seminar-series-when-should-the\/"},"modified":"2008-11-14T08:37:37","modified_gmt":"2008-11-14T08:37:37","slug":"seminar-series-when-should-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/14\/seminar-series-when-should-the\/","title":{"rendered":"Seminar Series: When Should They Be?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s seminar week over at Female Science Professor, and today she’s polling her readers<\/a> as to the best day and time for seminars.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Of course, it wasn’t always this way…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> be held during the common lunch hour, and any attempt to change that is met with huge resistance.<\/p>\n

So, our colloquia are on Thursdays, in the lunch hour, along with every other science and engineering department.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

When would your ideal seminar time be, and when is your seminar actually held?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading Seminar Series: When Should They Be?<\/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-3154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3154","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=3154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}