When I was at my last place of employment someone recommended a book to me, "Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman." I can't remember a single bit of advice from it, other than to be bold and always sit at the main meeting table, because you are taken more seriously that way.
But one thing I seem to remember from it is, perhaps incorrectly, is that when a man walks into a room he quickly assesses who is in charge. He is trained to do this, either by his social upbringing or it's wired into his genes hailing back to alpha-male primate days. In contrast, women do not usually assess workplace/social situations with the same sort of hiearchical eye by default. Thus, I try to look at these situations from multiple perspectives when I am in them, just to try to get a handle on what might be going on.
Recently I attended a talk where I watched what looked like a monumental power struggle play out, and was really not sure what to make of it. A male grad student was giving a talk. Another male person (grad student? postdoc?) kept interrupting Every. Single. Slide. to nitpick one thing or another. About halfway through the talk, Senior Professor (advisor to the student, I think) started interrupting with clarification questions, which started out nice and then got progressively more aggressive as the talk went on. He and others also snickered from time to time at several of the slides, which as far as I could tell just had equations on them.
Toward the end of the talk, Outsider Postdoc starts asking questions and eggs on the first interrupter guy, while still trying to occasionally include the speaker in the discourse. A few other men start chiming in with their two cents, some reasonable, some insulting, and eventually the entire thing dissolves into a rapid-fire bloodbath with the speaker left lying on the ground twitching, croaking, "This work is preliminary...just a first step..."
After a very long and uncomfortable time, my colleague and I managed to escape the seminar room and as we were walking back to our department felt extremely unsure about what had just happened in there. My colleague remarked that they actually weren't sure who the speaker was, because the audience members talked so much.
The funny thing is, of all the things those audience members said, I think only about 10% of the points were really about the research. The other 90% were "Look how smart I am" and "My slide rule is bigger than yours."
In science, I think there is a difference between precision and nit-picking. You can help someone in their research to find the clarity necessary to be strong as scientists without publicly humiliating them. You can ask useful questions politely while still demonstrating your intelligence to whomever it is you're trying to impress.
Having been executed this way before, sometimes I just want to stand up and call out for a cease fire.
Showing posts with label public-speaking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public-speaking. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Saturday, September 25, 2010
How to get invited to give talks
It's good to give talks at other institutions as a graduate student. You get to meet new people, learn about new research areas, swap ideas, get feedback on your work, get practice giving talks, etc. And it looks nice on your CV.
As far as I can tell, there are about four ways to get invited to give talks:
1) Be a superstar, and people will just invite you to give talks all the time
This is pretty unlikely as a graduate student, unless you're like my friend Hedy, who seems to get talk invitations all the time. She also is often asked to serve on program committees, submit journal papers, etc. Her research is just that smoking.
2) Have an advisor who is good at networking
I'm sorry to say odds are stacked against you if you're a Computer Scientist, because we all know how the joke goes: "The introverted Computer Scientist looks at their own shoes while talking, and the extroverted Computer Scientist looks at yours." Lots of truth there.
Some people get lucky, and if they don't get advisors who are good at networking they at least get ones who are superstar researchers. What happens in this case is the superstar advisor is so busy being awesome they have no time to accept all the invitations they get, thus passing them on to you.
For those of us who are (not yet) superstars, and/or have shy advisors, how do you get talk invitations? Well, I've found two tricks to work pretty well -
3) Talk swap
The idea here is you know someone who is doing neat research, and they either live close to your institution or they will be visiting some time soon. So you invite them to come give a talk. Often times, they will return the invitation. A colleague and I did this once recently. His institution is an hour away from me. So he gave a talk in my research group, and a few weeks later I traveled to give a talk at his research group.
4) Invite yourself
Academics, at least Computer Scientists, love to be entertained. So when we have someone who says, "Hi, I'm doing research in area X. I'm going to be in town the last week of November, can I come give a talk?" most places are very happy to have you. Especially if you come on someone else's dime. I've never done this cold - I've always at least known someone who knew someone - but I know people who have and I think it's perfectly acceptable.
You can do this if you're traveling for academic reasons (e.g., conference, project meeting), but you can also do it when you're going somewhere for a vacation. Though do keep in mind you're more likely to receive a "yes" if you offer to come during the fall or spring semester. Winter break and summer are usually not the best time to go give talks, at least at my university, because many people are away.
If you are shy yourself, it can be a bit nerve wracking to invite yourself somewhere, but it's worth doing. The worst that happens is someone will say "No thank you," but it's really a small risk and can pay off handsomely. I've made a lot of fantastic contacts and met quite a few collaborators due to giving talks at their institutions, and learned about new areas of research which later fed into my own work.
As far as I can tell, there are about four ways to get invited to give talks:
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| Photo by Husky |
This is pretty unlikely as a graduate student, unless you're like my friend Hedy, who seems to get talk invitations all the time. She also is often asked to serve on program committees, submit journal papers, etc. Her research is just that smoking.
2) Have an advisor who is good at networking
I'm sorry to say odds are stacked against you if you're a Computer Scientist, because we all know how the joke goes: "The introverted Computer Scientist looks at their own shoes while talking, and the extroverted Computer Scientist looks at yours." Lots of truth there.
Some people get lucky, and if they don't get advisors who are good at networking they at least get ones who are superstar researchers. What happens in this case is the superstar advisor is so busy being awesome they have no time to accept all the invitations they get, thus passing them on to you.
For those of us who are (not yet) superstars, and/or have shy advisors, how do you get talk invitations? Well, I've found two tricks to work pretty well -
3) Talk swap
The idea here is you know someone who is doing neat research, and they either live close to your institution or they will be visiting some time soon. So you invite them to come give a talk. Often times, they will return the invitation. A colleague and I did this once recently. His institution is an hour away from me. So he gave a talk in my research group, and a few weeks later I traveled to give a talk at his research group.
4) Invite yourself
Academics, at least Computer Scientists, love to be entertained. So when we have someone who says, "Hi, I'm doing research in area X. I'm going to be in town the last week of November, can I come give a talk?" most places are very happy to have you. Especially if you come on someone else's dime. I've never done this cold - I've always at least known someone who knew someone - but I know people who have and I think it's perfectly acceptable.
You can do this if you're traveling for academic reasons (e.g., conference, project meeting), but you can also do it when you're going somewhere for a vacation. Though do keep in mind you're more likely to receive a "yes" if you offer to come during the fall or spring semester. Winter break and summer are usually not the best time to go give talks, at least at my university, because many people are away.
If you are shy yourself, it can be a bit nerve wracking to invite yourself somewhere, but it's worth doing. The worst that happens is someone will say "No thank you," but it's really a small risk and can pay off handsomely. I've made a lot of fantastic contacts and met quite a few collaborators due to giving talks at their institutions, and learned about new areas of research which later fed into my own work.
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