This morning, I finished making the slides for a talk I’m giving at the BCCE at Purdue next week. (Any of you chemists or chemical educators in the audience planning on being there?) I feel very proud of myself for having the slides written and ready to use days before I even board the plane. I’m even sufficiently enthusiastic that I may just start writing a paper-version of the content I’ll be giving in my talk.
That brings me to my question for academics and others who work in the media of “paper” and “presentation”:
Which do you typically write first?
Do you write a paper first and then adapt it to a suitable format for presentation*? Or do you write your talk first and then use it as the basis for a paper (which might be more lengthy, formal, detailed, etc.)?
Is this a pattern you’re happy with, or do you ever think you’d rather do it the other way around? (If the latter, what exactly is stopping you or has stopped you from doing it the other way around?)
_________
*Opinions vary on what counts as a suitable format for presentation. There’s this practice in philosophy where, rather than giving a talk, a philosopher will read the audience a paper. This sometimes happens even in instances where the paper has circulated to audience members in advance — which means you can watch the presenter reading his or her paper while audience members read along on their own photocopies of the same paper.
Maybe it’s my early training as a chemist (since, in chemistry, no one gives this sort of presentation), but I have always found the reading-to-the-audience format offputting. But, it’s one where clearly the writing of the paper comes before the “writing of the talk”.
Monthly Archives: July 2006
Picking out patterns (or not): a few links.
Here are a few items that have been bouncing around in my head of late. Are they connected to each other? You be the judge.
- “In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks.” That is, hands down, my favorite sentence in K.C. Cole’s article in the May/June 2006 Columbia Journalism Review. The article tries to explain why editors (and their penchant for making things absolutely clear) can get in the way of good science journalism, but it has some interesting observations on the nature of science, too.
What, exactly, is meant by ‘a life’?
A tale of two job searches (Having a family and an academic career, part 4).
A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don’t seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of “a life” (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more likely to come in every day (maybe evenings and weekends, too) to bust his or her butt for the job? Which is less likely to be distracted from teaching, research, and service to the organization? Which is less likely to need time off for someone else’s medical crisis? Which is less likely to leave suddenly when a partner gets a job offer elsewhere?
The candidate with no life.
For the job seeker, then, we decided the best strategy would be to hide all traces of “a life” from the search committee. Once you had a job offer, though, you could safely ask questions about childcare facilities, employment opportunities for a spouse, etc., because once the committee was at the point of offering you a job, the committee members had a stake in convincing themselves they had made a completely rational decision that you were the best person for the job. Believing themselves to have made a rational decision to hire you, they could accommodate the knowledge that you came with some baggage; not to do so would force them to engage with the possibility that maybe their decisions were not always based on qualifications for the job.
Four months pregnant with younger offspring, as I prepared to fly, alone, to New York for philosophy’s major job-seeking convention, I couldn’t help but recall this earlier discussion on a plane. I was going stealth with my baggage.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 3).
At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile.
Given what the first several weeks with a newborn are like, that’s entirely appropriate.
This, also, is the part of the story where particulars start making a huge difference. The decisions we made were contingent on the range of options that were open to us at any given moment; with different circumstances, we might have been on a completely different trajectory. In a number of instances, we were lucky things worked out as well as they did.
Diagnosis, please?
The name of the ice cream and coffee blended concoction Cappachillo makes me think immediately of some chimeraical combination of a chinchilla and a chupacabra (blended with coffee and ice cream, of course).
Do you suppose this is an indication of caffeine deficiency, heat exhaustion, or both?
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 2).
Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, “How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?”
Then I remembered: I’d have to tell my advisor.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 1).
I’ve decided to go ahead and say something about how I navigated (and am still navigating) the challenge of trying to have an academic career and a family as well. This is not a topic I can adequately address in a single post, so bear with me. And, since my main motivation for doing this is the hope that knowing about my experiences may be useful, somehow, to other people contemplating these waters, ask me if there’s something I’m leaving out that you want me to talk about. (If it’s too personal, I’ll say so.)
I think Rob Knop’s comment is dead-on. Many of us in academia have been trained to exude such dedication to our field (through whatever combination of scholarship, teaching, and service our institution values) that we worry it will get us in trouble to admit we have other interests as well. Especially for those on the job market or trying to get tenure, demonstrating too great an interest in something out of the academic sphere — like having kids — is something you fear might bring critical attention upon you. My sense this is even more true for women in fields that are still largely male-dominated; you want people to notice your great research or teaching, not to think to themselves, “See, she’s not sufficiently committed to the field, or she wouln’t even be thinking of taking time away from it for something as mundane as childrearing! We were better off before we started wasting our program on these women.”
In order to blend in, there are lots of things we don’t talk about. But if more people talked about them, talking about them wouldn’t make us stand out quite as much. So at least in this little corner of cyberspace, let’s talk.
This post is the “set up”: the situation I found myself in when I started contemplating whether it would be feasible (or insane) to have an academic career and a family.
Friday Sprog Blogging: bugs!
It has been very hot in these parts. Last night, the Free-Ride family had a picnic in the back yard. There were also some bugs.
Younger offspring: There are lots of bugs out here!
Elder offspring: Don’t worry, the mosquitos don’t come out until later.
Younger offspring: Good, I don’t want a mosquito bite.
Dr. Free-Ride: I know a good way not to get mosquito bites: invite Uncle Fishy over. Mosquitos love Uncle Fishy!
Younger offspring: Ticks, too?
Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know about ticks.
Elder offspring: Hey, when you’re tasty, you’re tasty.
Career pressures (working for the feds edition).
I’m working against a deadline today in the three-dimensional world, but the Union of Concerned Scientists has just released the results of a new survey of scientists working for the Food and Drug Administration, and I thought it was worth passing along. I’m never sure what to make of the proportion of the people who get a survey that actually respond to it; UCS sent this survey to almost 6000 FDA scientists and only about 1/6 of them responded. Will the statistics mavens pipe up to tell us whether (and how) this should influence our interpretations of the results?
The UCS press release after the jump.