Goals are dreams with deadlines.
– Diana Scharf Hunt
The last few days our research group has been literally perturbed by a deadline for abstract submission to a major scientific meeting. It happens a few times per year and almost every research group around the world live more or less the same level of excitement. Not only for the student trying to make sense of their data and get to present their work at key scientific meetings but also for the supervisor.
Just completed the reading of the book the Art of Explanation by Lee Lefever. I must admit that although I really like Nancy Duarte’s duo Slide:ology and Resonate, Lefever’s book does focus on concepts that are also not that well covered in the other books. In particular, knowing your audience: to whom are you presenting and for what purpose.
I have previously described some inherent conditions related to PhD studies. It turns out that there is much to be said about undergraduate studies also.
I remember vividly in the first semester physics courses having one of the professor describing us the “truth” about undergraduate studies, in particular in physics. Why physics? Because this is one of these undergrad program where you are expected to do graduate studies to increase you chance of employment (relative to an engineering degree)
Over the last few years, I notice (though it might be anecdotal since I haven’t done a thorough review) that the less original content is present in a poster or talk, the less likely someone is to acknowledge that their work is a remake and seems to simply skip proper referencing. This year, I have seen a perfect (and I mean it!) remake of a work we have published three years ago. The talk did not even had a single reference, not just to our work but to any works…
These talks or posters are basically presented as original, totally new. Is this a failure of the supervisor when attributing the topic or that of the student for failing to do a proper literature review?
We have all heard of the 30 seconds elevator pitch. In fact, if you search for those terms in Google, you will get over a hundred thousand hits. It seems that this has even been push to an art or even “engineered” systems.
Traveling with colleagues and students to one of the major scientific meeting in our field.
Year after year, one word come to mind: exciting!
Ruminating... 