Talks to student audiences

When talking to undergraduates and grad students at various departments, I've often heard them wish that speakers would give a talk pitched at a lower level so that they had an opportunity to understand what current research in the field looks like. If such a program was in place already, I've uniformly heard from grad students how much they appreciate the feature. In general, I think this is a great idea. Coming out of undergrad, other than some small summer "research" jobs coding, I had no idea what real research looked like.

I've seen various implementations of this idea. My graduate program had a seminar series given primarily by professors in the department pitching their research to first and second year students. This was mostly a way for professors to attract gradstudents. It also gave a way for older students to know what research was happening in the department outside their area of specialization. Sometimes grad students would use it as an opportunity to talk about their own research before a thesis defence or a conference talk. My first post doc institution had a series where a few outside speakers a year would come and give a colloquium talk aimed at the general public. Needless to say, these were generally big names with sexy topics to draw an audience from outside the department. I've seen one department have regular pre-talks aimed at grad students, given the same day as the regular talk. These had the goal of giving the grad students enough background material to be able to understand some of the main talk. And recently, I had the opportunity to participate in a seminar series with talks aimed primarily at undergrads and gradstudents.

The only other time I've given a talk aimed at this audience was in my graduate seminar series. At that point, my goal for the talk was to gain practise at giving talks. I think this recent talk went well, but I'm not sure how I should judge that. Nor am I sure what my goal for this talk should have been. Surely there is a "service" aspect of it; exposing other students to what modern research looks like. But are there other aspects I should be looking at when giving such talks? Is there a long term networking aspect to this? Am I overthinking the issue too much? I certainly enjoyed the experience, I'm just not sure what to make of it.

Have other people given such talks? What were your goals going into it, and what do you get out of it? 

WOOT!

One of my summer students' presentation was selected as a semi-finalist in the summer research project presentation contest.

Each summer researcher gets an opportunity to either give a short oral presentation or a poster session on their summer work. I've been very happy and impressed with her work, and she showed me her presentation before she gave it, but I didn't know it was a competition.

There are two more rounds of speaking, and then cash prizes go to the top 3 students. I take no credit for this one, but I'm very excited for her. WOOT!

Scientific open mic

Ms MSE posted a while ago about about how to get experience speaking in public. My Post doc supervisor has set up a summer seminar where her myriad of underlings can present on what they are thinking about each week. It's done very informally, and completely coincidentally, one of the graduate students started calling it an open mic. In fact, after one person has presented, there is the standard awkward moment that many open mics have where everyone looks at each other trying to figure out who will go next.

I really like the format. I've never been part of a large lab that has group meetings. I wonder if this is what they feel like (if run well). There's some heckling, but a lot of good questions and answers and suggestions of directions to pursue. I think my presentation skills would have benefited greatly if I'd had the opportunity to talk about my work like this.

The amazing thing is, that in my field, it seems to be understood that it is impossible for someone who is not in your specific subfield to understand what your research is. This is the main reason I've been given for not having a broad seminar like this. The seminar attendees in this case have a very broad set of interests, that could easily be the set of interests shared by the students of a group of faculty who generally work in the same area. Yet there is good communication among students and insightful questions asked.

I'm encouraging my summer students to attend. I think I will encourage them to talk as well. I think, if I ever land a TT position, I will try to implement something like this with the students of other professors that I work closely with.