Allerton, but I...
I have officially gone to my first conference. I feel like such an... academic. It was fun. Went to a lot of talks, some of them good.
A talk. It's a strange term when you think about it. I suppose there's a walk, or a drive, or a look. English is good at turning verbs into nouns. But still, a talk. It's not a speech. That's different. A speech is, well, what a politician does, not an engineer. We give talks. Not a presentation either. That's what you do for a class. A talk is a real thing, about something in the real world, or at least the real academic world, which is probably an oxymoron; but, you know, something important, with results, that you came up with yourself. And probably not too long. With slides. So really, what you're doing could be much more pointing and showing than talking. As opposed to a speech, which really is just talking, but we couldn't call it a talk, because that would be confusing.
I have a pretty low opinion of my public speaking ability, or really my ability to explain things to people in general, and it's definitely something I want to work on as I progress through whatever it is I'm progressing through. Of course, it's one of those things that just sucks to get better at, because every single time I have to do it I do all I can to avoid it, then dread it, panic, spend huge amounts of time preparing, and inevitably end up sucking. I think the talk I gave at Allerton was... okay. Definitely could have been worse. Somebody in the audience commented afterward that it was hard to tell if I was nervous or excited. Betcha can't guess which it was. I have a tendency for my brain to go a bit faster than my mouth, so what comes out ends up being a bit jumbled, and significantly a lot more words in the sentence than what I than I meant to have.
I often try when watching talks to identify the difference between a good talk and a bad talk. I kinda know a good talk when I see it, but sometimes it's hard to really pick out exactly what's good about it. It can be easier with bad talks, like when the guy seemingly puts his entire paper on the slides and then proceeds to monotonously read every word, equation, and figure. That's bad.
One of the things I found that made a talk very unpleasant to attend, at least for me, was when I just lost the thread of what the person was saying. This probably happened for about 40% of the talks I went to, and I wonder if that's common. Maybe I'm just not enough of an expert in this field to understand all these talks, but I really feel like people don't always take enough time at the beginning to just say what they're doing, you know, in words, without equations. Also, I think it's good to repeat important ideas in case someone didn't quite get it at the first time, or they just forgot. Otherwise, if I couldn't quite follow it at the start, I'm lost for the next 29 minutes, and there's no hope of finding it again. I'm not even sure this is always indicative of a bad talk, because the same talk could have been very good if I'd managed to follow it. Of course, I know that when you spend so much time thinking about something, it's hard to pull back to that perspective of someone who just started thinking about it 30 seconds ago. Absolutely happens to me. But, I'm just a second year grad student. Everyone else is supposed to be, you know, better.
In any case, I survived, and so did the people listening to me.
A talk. It's a strange term when you think about it. I suppose there's a walk, or a drive, or a look. English is good at turning verbs into nouns. But still, a talk. It's not a speech. That's different. A speech is, well, what a politician does, not an engineer. We give talks. Not a presentation either. That's what you do for a class. A talk is a real thing, about something in the real world, or at least the real academic world, which is probably an oxymoron; but, you know, something important, with results, that you came up with yourself. And probably not too long. With slides. So really, what you're doing could be much more pointing and showing than talking. As opposed to a speech, which really is just talking, but we couldn't call it a talk, because that would be confusing.
I have a pretty low opinion of my public speaking ability, or really my ability to explain things to people in general, and it's definitely something I want to work on as I progress through whatever it is I'm progressing through. Of course, it's one of those things that just sucks to get better at, because every single time I have to do it I do all I can to avoid it, then dread it, panic, spend huge amounts of time preparing, and inevitably end up sucking. I think the talk I gave at Allerton was... okay. Definitely could have been worse. Somebody in the audience commented afterward that it was hard to tell if I was nervous or excited. Betcha can't guess which it was. I have a tendency for my brain to go a bit faster than my mouth, so what comes out ends up being a bit jumbled, and significantly a lot more words in the sentence than what I than I meant to have.
I often try when watching talks to identify the difference between a good talk and a bad talk. I kinda know a good talk when I see it, but sometimes it's hard to really pick out exactly what's good about it. It can be easier with bad talks, like when the guy seemingly puts his entire paper on the slides and then proceeds to monotonously read every word, equation, and figure. That's bad.
One of the things I found that made a talk very unpleasant to attend, at least for me, was when I just lost the thread of what the person was saying. This probably happened for about 40% of the talks I went to, and I wonder if that's common. Maybe I'm just not enough of an expert in this field to understand all these talks, but I really feel like people don't always take enough time at the beginning to just say what they're doing, you know, in words, without equations. Also, I think it's good to repeat important ideas in case someone didn't quite get it at the first time, or they just forgot. Otherwise, if I couldn't quite follow it at the start, I'm lost for the next 29 minutes, and there's no hope of finding it again. I'm not even sure this is always indicative of a bad talk, because the same talk could have been very good if I'd managed to follow it. Of course, I know that when you spend so much time thinking about something, it's hard to pull back to that perspective of someone who just started thinking about it 30 seconds ago. Absolutely happens to me. But, I'm just a second year grad student. Everyone else is supposed to be, you know, better.
In any case, I survived, and so did the people listening to me.