In our institute, we have a week of institute seminars, where in you are expected to give a talk (20 minutes + 5 minutes questions) related to your work or your field to an audience comprising of physicist, mathematicians and computer scientists. So basically, you can not use some high-funda terms of your field. And you should be able to communicate with an audience completely unaware of even basics of you field. About 30-40 talks are scheduled on 5 working days of the week.
Good Idea:
1. Evereybody in the institute gets to know what their collegues are working on.
2. One gets a nack of explaining their work to a lay man. (A big debate goes about need for doing this for later jobs in industry and funding for research in general).
3. Some times within the same field (say physics) the subareas are so different that a elimentary talk helps understanding better than a full length
technical talk.
4. You get snacks and coffee for free.
Bad Idea?
1. Some fields need a way too much technical background even to explain the most trivial results, seems impossible in 20 minutes.
2. Generally, the leap from accessible part of the talk to inaccessible part of the talk is abrupt and creates confusions. The audience is lost after first 5-10 minutes of the talk.
3. Needs way too much preparation time, who would want to be a speaker unless nudged politely to be one?
4. 8 talks a day....mad or what? not even if the coffee is free!!!!
Good Idea:
1. Evereybody in the institute gets to know what their collegues are working on.
2. One gets a nack of explaining their work to a lay man. (A big debate goes about need for doing this for later jobs in industry and funding for research in general).
3. Some times within the same field (say physics) the subareas are so different that a elimentary talk helps understanding better than a full length
technical talk.
4. You get snacks and coffee for free.
Bad Idea?
1. Some fields need a way too much technical background even to explain the most trivial results, seems impossible in 20 minutes.
2. Generally, the leap from accessible part of the talk to inaccessible part of the talk is abrupt and creates confusions. The audience is lost after first 5-10 minutes of the talk.
3. Needs way too much preparation time, who would want to be a speaker unless nudged politely to be one?
4. 8 talks a day....mad or what? not even if the coffee is free!!!!
Comments
very similar one.