Presenting to Peers

So this is just a random comment, but I realized recently how infrequently a grad student gets the opportunity to present to his/her peers. Well actually I didn't realize it, a friend of mine in the program realized in and brought it to all of our attention. He offered to start off a set of presentations that we, as students, would give to each other.

This may sound a little ridiculous at first. You're thinking: "What on earth is he talking about? Poster sessions, journal clubs, lab meetings, maybe a departmental presentation or two aren't enough?" Well, yea, I guess those are quite considerable. Our peers form most of the audience for those presentations. But in those circumstances there is almost always an authority figure present. There's your PI or even other PIs and members of your thesis committee. There's a program director or maybe even a judge who is looking for the presentation that wins a prize.

And that is great. Don't get me wrong; we need that. But where is the opportunity for us to grow into independent scholars? Where is the opportunity for us to shape a presentation style that is designed to speak to an audience that understands the material at our level, and on our own terms? I've noticed that the talks that are most captivating at conferences are those that are delivered with a sense of familiarity and comfort with both the subject mater and the audience. They're often delivered with humor and the occasional hint of wry, self-deprecating humility. If we want to train not just scientists, but communicators, we should give them the chance to train their art in an uninhibited setting. I'm concerned that always reporting our results in front of people we need to impress may further entrench systems of jargon and insular academic perspective.

I'm not trying to badmouth lab meeting or committee meetings. Those are opportunities to expose our line of research to outside challenge, and sometimes even outside attack. We need that. We need to learn to think like scientists. That means constantly revisiting our own assumptions and our own familiarity with our discipline. But maybe every once in a while the big guys could step out of the room and us baby scientists could talk about what we do to each other. It might save a little adrenalin for another day, and it might foster lines of cooperation between students that could last through our careers.  And who knows, maybe we wouldn't have to sit through so many presentations that sound like someone reading through their alphabet soup.