I have given bad talks. I bet you have too. My guess is the people who think they haven’t given a bad talk give the worst ones.

What follows refers to colloquia at schools like mine, where the main purpose is to get the undergraduates excited about some sort of math that they’ve never seen before, and maybe show us faculty something cool too. And by the way, this stuff also works for job talks, at least here at Hood, a small, primarily undergraduate liberal arts college. If your environment is completely different, please leave a comment with your own tips.

Podium View by ChrisDag on Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0

I didn’t know colloquia like this existed when I first started giving talks. I’d only seen them at R1s, which were obviously another animal entirely. And even many of those violated a lot of the excellent advice in John E. McCarthy’s article How to Give A Good Colloquium: they confuse colloquia with seminars and overshoot their audience, they don’t give enough examples, and prove too much. And since those are the kinds grad students see, those are the kinds we give, and the cycle of violence continues.

I thought if you got invited somewhere, you had to talk about your research. And when they said to “make it mostly accessible to undergraduates, and the first part accessible to undergraduates that have only had calculus,” that just meant include more definitions and talk slower.

And I can never talk slower.

But once I got to this job, and started seeing the talks people would give here, and started hearing about the talks my colleagues would give at other schools, I finally realized that there were other options. And I think I’m finally getting better. So I’ll list a couple things I’ve learned the hard way.

1. Your colloquium is not your defense

I mean this both in terms of content and purpose. Your job is not to prove how smart you are, or how much math you know. The people who’ve invited you know you’re smart and know math. We just want you to show our students (and us) some cool stuff that you’re passionate about. If your slides are largely recycled from your defense with some extra definitions added, you’re about to give a lousy talk.

And don’t worry if somebody in the audience thinks you’re not a hotshot researcher because you don’t act like every result is trivial and every definition well-known. There aren’t as many of those people as I used to think, and impressing them isn’t worth losing almost everyone else in the room.

2. You don’t need to talk about your research

If you’re asked to give a talk aimed largely at undergraduates, and most undergraduates don’t have any of the prerequisite knowledge to understand your research, don’t think it’s your job to slam a whole graduate education into 50 minutes. I don’t care how good of a teacher you are. It’s just not going to work.

Find something else to talk about! Maybe your favorite theorem? A neat application of your research area? Is there some problem you ran across somewhere that you found interesting? I can’t speak for everyone at every school, or even every small liberal arts college, but I’d rather my students see you explore some fun old Martin Gardner puzzles in depth than sit through an unintelligible research talk.

3. Don’t make us wait to the end to see the point

Most of the research talks we see at conferences are ones where the first 20-30% are definitions and setup, the bulk is results and maybe their proofs, and the last bit has an application or some ideas for future work. And that’s fine for talks amongst ourselves – we know the drill, we can see the big picture, and we’re patient. Undergraduates don’t, can’t, and shouldn’t have to be. Tell us at the beginning why your talk is going to be interesting, and spend significant time putting your result and/or broader research area in context, either within mathematics or with respect to applications. If there are any bits where you can get away with just arguing by analogy, or using informal language instead of slogging through slide after slide of definitions, do it. If anybody wants details they can look them up.

The reason cold opens are used so often in movies and tv is that they’re compelling: they show us something interesting that happened, and make us wonder how that came to be. Whereas movies that start with a lot of clumsy exposition are bad movies. Colloquia are no different.

4. In your slides, less is more (unless it’s pictures or intermediate steps)

Take out as many words as possible, and then take out more. Your slides aren’t a script for you to read out loud. They’re a place to display the stuff the audience won’t be able to keep in their heads while you’re talking.

But if you’re running through a calculation of something, don’t (necessarily) skip all the algebra because it’s boring and a pain to typeset. That might be the one part of your talk that one particular undergrad in the audience can follow. Maybe it’s not thrilling for you or I, but giving the student audience a few little easily-digestible crumbs might be just enough to get them to stick with you for a few more minutes. Talks to a non-technical audience are as much about making people feel like they know what’s going on as making them actually know what’s going on. It’s possible to do the former even when you’re not doing a great job at the latter. Don’t speed through the easy stuff if you can help it.

Also, find more pictures. They don’t even have to be super relevant. Everybody likes pictures. Citing somebody’s famous result? Throw a picture of them in there. Why not.

5. If you don’t know exactly how to pitch your talk, ask

This goes double for job talks. Not everybody has the same idea in mind when they say “accessible to undergraduates.” And not every group of undergraduates is the same. Maybe the usual attendees happen to have all taken a few advanced courses, or maybe they’re all a bunch of calc 1 students who get extra credit for attending. Maybe the school culture means the attendees are almost all faculty and they’d like you to aim the level a little higher. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d rather you ask me too many questions about the audience than just guess and guess wrong. And don’t just go by what the school calls their talk series. We often call ours a seminar, but please don’t come here thinking it’s your weekly research seminar in grad school all over again.

Even if you’re giving a job talk, they might not care if you talk about your actual research, or just any topic you find interesting. If it’s not clear from the communication with the committee, ask. In retrospect, I think some of my interviews would have been a lot better if I’d come up with a talk that wasn’t about my research instead.

I’ve given as many caveats as possible here because I know this advice won’t apply to every talk at every school. If your environment is completely different and you have different, or even contradictory advice, please leave a comment. Together, maybe we can all sit through (and give) slightly fewer bad colloquia.

My due date is less than two months away, and I’m starting to feel it. All things considered I’ve been lucky so far. First trimester was tough, but the nausea wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. The harder part was what early pregnancy did to my brain. I couldn’t focus, was exhausted all the time, and I felt almost…dissociative, out-of-body somehow. Research was out the window; I could barely handle teaching. And the worst part was I didn’t want to tell many people yet, so I just came off as a kind-of crabby zombie for no reason.

Things slowly improved over the summer, though I still don’t have the energy and drive I used to. And now I’m starting the final descent, with each day a little more tired, a little more out of breath, and a little more uncomfortable. My main complaint now is that running around the classroom seems to cause a lot of “practice” contractions, which, while annoying, probably aren’t going to lead to any problems.

Probably.

I try to sit down when possible. But my students are too polite, and they don’t want to bother me when they have questions. So I keep moving during class as best I can. So far it’s working.

Maternity Leave – How much and when?

My school’s maternity leave policy is a vague. Normally leave is granted for “a minimum of 6 weeks.” That’s tricky when a professor needs to be replaced in the classroom, so it goes on to say that a semester may be granted, with the Provost assigning “other duties” during the time when the faculty member is not on leave. It’s not spelled out what those duties are, nor is there an upper bound on that 6-week-minimum leave. And there haven’t been a ton of babies amongst the faculty lately, so I didn’t have a lot of data points to build from.

I didn’t want to take the fall semester off, as most of it would be spent twiddling my thumbs until the baby got here, and then rushing back to work in the spring with a barely two-month-old. I know 8 weeks is more than most American parents get, but if I could get more, I was going to take it. But I also didn’t want to be completely off all spring, since I think I’d lose my mind being home all day every day with a newborn. And I didn’t want to leave my small department down a person for a whole semester.

So my chair and I cobbled together a mix of teaching last summer, a couple one-credit classes this spring, and a service obligation that comes with a course release (on our new assessment board – I hope my child appreciates the sacrifices I make). The department will divvy up my courses for the last month of the semester, and receive prorated pay accordingly. I feel a guilty about adding to their workload, but hopefully the little bit of cash will help.

The provost signed off on it! Probably too readily in hindsight: I think I left some money on the table. But I’ll only have to go into the office one day a week, maybe two. Enough to keep me from going crazy, but not so much that I need to take out another mortgage for infant childcare. I don’t plan to stop the tenure clock, since I really don’t think I’ll need the extra time.

It was hard to decide how much leave felt appropriate. I’m still not sure I made the right call. A couple of weeks felt too little, though some women are perfectly happy with that. A full semester and change seemed too much, though again, I know some folks take that long and longer. Asking a lot of people for their experiences and opinions helped, but ultimately I just had to make my best guess at what would work. We’ll see.

So far I’ve only gotten positive feedback. The faculty members I’ve spoken with are glad to see maternity leave, and academic parenthood in general, become more normalized. Of course if there is anyone out there who disapproves, I doubt they’d tell me directly. One of the benefits of a small teaching college is that there’s more pressure for colleagues to be, well, collegial. And as long as everybody still signs off on my tenure dossier in a couple years, I couldn’t care less if a few people grumble.

Hello from the end of my first week back to teaching! I’m teaching Linear Algebra right now, and enjoying it quite a bit. In some of the in between moments, I’m looking back on my summer and wondering where it went. I spent the last week of summer at the Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation Conference at MIT. This was a great conference for me for lots of reasons. I was looking for an application of a technique for a paper I am working on, and BAM one appeared before me in a talk! There were just tons of wonderful people there, both friends and people I didn’t know but whose work I admire. The conference was really well organized (thanks, Simons Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory, and Computation group members!) and right in my area of interest, so it makes sense that things could go well. But a non-trivial part of everything going great was that this was my only conference of the summer. I had lots of social energy because I hadn’t already had 10 giant conference dinners this summer. It was the first time I’d seen all of the talks, and there was a really good slate of speakers, so I didn’t have any trouble staying engaged. If I had already been to 10 conferences this summer, I might have been checked out during the talk when the exciting application appeared. As it was, I felt that I took almost optimal advantage of this experience. I had the most fun, and learned the most math, possible for me.  So this brings me to ask the question: Do I usually go to too many conferences? How many conferences should a person go to in a summer?

One of the pieces of advice I have been given over and over, especially in my role writing this blog, is that early career people should get out there and talk about their work. Meet people, make connections, get a broader understanding of the field. I think this is great advice, and I followed it. I followed it hard. So did a lot of people that I know, and I/we saw all of the advertised benefits. Certainly there are still many good points to going to conferences: there are tons more people to meet and results to share/hear about. It also keeps my CV growing (third year review this fall) to go and give a lot of talks. Giving talks has a whole extra set of benefits, in that it makes me think of my work in a fresh way each time I explain it in a new setting. But even conferences (like this one) where I don’t speak can have enormous practical benefits.

However… there are costs. Costs as in literal money. Being out of graduate school for a few years, I’m not funded to go to as many conferences as I used to be. Also, there are costs in time to work or relax, lost sleep in bad flight schedules, and costs in experiences I could have connecting with people in the place where I actually live. Environmental costs visible in my ballooning carbon footprint and all the disposables that I use every time I travel. Sometimes there are costs to my students, when I travel while teaching. All these costs are payable, and sometimes really worth paying. But they add up, and I have decided that there has to be a limit. More is not always better. Sometimes I even have to say no.  

I have written about this before, and limiting my conferences was just one in a long list of ideas to better manage my environmental impact and work-life balance.  But the idea that going to fewer conferences could make those conferences I do go much more worthwhile was not prominent in my mind at the time.  This conference at MIT made me appreciate just how much I can enjoy a conference when I have the energy and mental space to take full advantage of it. I don’t think I can bring those resources to more than a couple conferences in a summer, so I want to learn how to make the resources that I do have count as much as possible in choosing my travel. Some people just thrive on the conference circuit—maybe it’s okay that I don’t. So I think that next summer I will go to a maximum of three major math events. Maybe one conference wasn’t quite enough, but two or three sounds like the sweet spot.

What is the optimum number of conferences for your math life? How do you decide when to say yes or no? Other thoughts? Let me know in the comments!