Sunday, September 20, 2009

Can't talk the talk...

I heard an invited talk recently by a young professor from a MRU, and I was surprised by how poorly it went. A few characteristics of a poorly prepared / delivered talk:

  • The talk has no central theme / unclear introduction and motivation of the overarching scientific problem.
  • The speaker is unable to explain the data he/she is showing, not because it's at the frontier of what's known, but because they didn't think twice before including any and every bit of data their students emailed them.
  • The speaker's research area is in "X-Y engineering," but whenever they're talking about X and are asked a question they say "well, I'm not an expert in X" and regarding Y "I'm not an expert in Y." This makes me as an audience member wonder what exactly their expertise is.
  • There are many interruptions from the audience, not because they're excited, but because they're confused or just don't believe what's being presented.
  • The talk is going so poorly, that the speaker her/himself offers to stop before it's finished.

This particular talk fulfilled all of the above criteria. What surprised me most is that this person survived academia long enough to become a faculty member at a top MRU. How?!

And for those of you wondering if this person was just having an "off day," the professor's graduate students commented that this was fairly representative. Again, how is this possible?

On a broader note, many people comment on the lack of presentation skills possessed by people in the scientific community (think back to conferences you've attended where slides were too jam-packed or where half the audience was asleep or had their eyes glazed over). Content is of the utmost importance, but I wonder if we could all stand to learn a little more about how to effectively present that content, eg, by borrowing from disciplines (such as advertising) where presentation is king.

2 comments:

  1. Seems unlikely that this individual will make tenure.

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  2. What I found surprising is that this person is fairly successful at securing funding. Maybe that just means good writing skills don't correlate with good general communication skills? I don't know. This will remain a mystery to me...

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