6 Reasons Why You Fail to Understand Tech Talks

1. You don’t belong in the audience.  If you’re an anthropologist and go to a supercomputing conference and visit a workshop on cluster computing, and fail to understand anything, it’s because you don’t have the appropriate background.

2. The presenter doesn’t understand what he/she is doing.  Believe it or not, once you get deep into a subject, it’s actually far easier to stay in the jargon world then it is to come back down to the real world where earthlings reside and explain the concepts for people outside of your esoteric community. And if you can't explain what you're doing for people outside your community, then you don't really understand what you're doing.

3. The presenter sucks at presenting.  This is separate from the material being crap.  This point has to do with the presenter’s inability to present.  This may manifest as an inaudible voice.  Alternatively (or additionally) you may notice it in the terribly prepared slides with tons and tons of text.  Another red flag is when you see an overly complicated slide with too much information, or information that’s thrown at you all at once instead of piece by piece.

4. The presenter doesn’t have enough time to present the material the right way.  This is a pretty popular reason.  Think about this.  As a PhD student, you’ve spent 3+ years of your life on a research topic.  You are now trying to distill all of it (for job talks) or some of it (for conferences) to anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.  Not. Possible.  If an hour to 90 minutes is given, somehow magically, that seems to be enough time.    

5.  You haven’t eaten.  When you’re hella hungry, you can’t think straight.  No matter how elementary the material, if your stomach is screaming at you, you’ll probably fail to understand what’s being presented.   

6. You’ve just eaten.  And by eaten, I mean stuffed yourself.  Stuffing yourself full of yummy food is the best way to lull yourself to sleep at something that’s as typically dry as a tech talk.

When a PhD Student Has an Advisor Only On Paper

So you’ve checked out this faculty member’s research. The work seems really intriguing to you. Moreover, the faculty member likes you, so the agreement is made. You now officially have an advisor. As time marches on, however, you realize something fishy. You realize while this faculty member is *nominally* your advisor, the faculty member isn’t actually advising you!

So the question is, what do you do when you find out that you don’t actually have an advisor? This dilemma is one that too many PhD students find themselves in year after year, institution to institution. Ideally, your advisor is supposed to train you to become a scientist. All too frequently this isn’t the case. So what do you do?

There are a number of alternatives. And you may want to do one, some, or all of the following, but if you find yourself in this kind of dilemma make sure you’re doing at least ONE of these suggestions.

• Find mentorship from more senior PhD students. Although this bunch can be surprisingly difficult to track down, when you do, they can be a tremendous resource.
  
• Find mentorship from a postdoc or another faculty member. If you have a relatively large department, this shouldn’t be too difficult. However, if there are few faculty and postdocs in your department, the next suggestion may be extremely helpful to you.
  
• Talk with students that actually have “real” advisors. By “real” advisor, I mean an advisor that actually trains their students (or at least has a reputation of doing so). In this way, you would learn what it is like (indirectly) to have an advisor that is actually training you.
• Check out the advice Web pages of faculty within your research area or field. You’d be surprised at the amount of useful advice is out there.

What are some ways you know of that people use to overcome not actually having an advisor?

Interrupting Your Interruptions

The following is an instance where research is actually useful.

In the pursuit of a PhD in this highly dynamic world, interruptions are ever-present. You are constantly bombarded by entities that demand your attention. Your email icon bounces around demanding to be read, text messages beep and demand to be answered, Google chat contacts demand to know how you are doing, office mates desire your attention to double check their work, all while Twitter keeps you up to date with the play by play of everything that is happening to everyone who knows you (relevant or otherwise) !

In Trafton's research on resuming interrupted tasks, he analyzes the responses of people who are interrupted while performing a task. Half of the subjects receive a warning preceding the interruption, while the other half of the subjects are immediately interrupted with no warning. The subjects who were warned of an impending interruption were able to prepare more for the divergence than participants in the immediate interruption condition, and resumed the interrupted task more quickly.

So what does this mean to you? When you are hard away at work on that important research paper, analysis, brainstorming session, and you are interrupted by a distraction, take that interruption signal as a warning. Give yourself some time to prepare to leave the task. Get yourself to a nice "stopping point" before you service the interruption. This will help you to return to your research much quickly, without getting distracted and wondering ".... now what was I doing ???" post-distraction. Interrupt the interruption by taking ownership of how and when you will choose to leave your task. This will help to ensure that you will be able to easily resume working.

J. Gregory Trafton, Erik M. Altmann, Derek P. Brock, Farilee E. Mintz, Preparing to resume an interrupted task: effects of prospective goal encoding and retrospective rehearsal, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 58, Issue 5, Notification User Interfaces, May 2003, Pages 583-603, ISSN 1071-5819, DOI: 10.1016/S1071-5819(03)00023-5.

How to Edit Like You Have a Ph.D. in Computer Science

Our brains are fabulous pieces of work. The brain loves filling in gaps. This ability can be helpful when we’re trying to solve problems and what not. However, what can be considered a gift in one context, can be considered a curse in another. Case in point: writing. How many times have you, thoughtfully, put together a writing masterpiece only to find that you’ve left critical words out of some sentence?? “One way to (missing words) algorithm, is through memoization.” And not only do our brains love to fill in gaps, they also love to delete what’s there too! “What causes causes Quicksort’s worst runtime?

So, how do you fix these kinds of issues? Read what you’ve written OUT LOUD. This is fine advice, and some search engine results will espouse the same thing. However, the reality is that by page 2 (okay maybe 3, :o), you will be reading in your head again without even knowing it. Well, if somebody else were to read it to you, that would be awesome wouldn’t it? Huh? What was that? You don’t know some loser who is sitting around all day waiting for you to ask him to read your document out loud to you? Then what can you do?

Dun, Dun, Duuuuuun! Text-to-Speech (TTS) to the Rescue!

On a Mac, do the following:

1. System Preferences --> Speech
2. Choose the System Voice You Want (there are male and female voices)
3. Choose the Key Combination You Want to Activate TTS When You Highlight Text On Your Computer

Now your computer can be your flunkie! After you write a document and you want to proof it, try having your computer read it out loud to you. I guarantee you’ll save yourself all kinds of embarrassment.

FYI: I eradicated 3 different errors in this post alone using this strategy. The proof is in the pudding.

Windows Users: I don’t know if Windows has a similar TTS built into the OS (leave a comment indicating how for Windows if there is a way to activate TTS). If there’s no way for Windows to do it, then there’s plenty of vendors that make TTS software for Windows. Note that Web-based alternatives may be undesirable if the information to be proofed is sensitive.

How To Feel & Be Impressively Educated

The Problem
Ever forgot something that you knew really well? Like back in school when you were taking courses, you totally dominated the class, but if, right now, you were asked anything but the simplest questions on the subject you’d experience the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon, or worse, the “WTF!” phenomenon. Ever been in a course where the professor assumed you remembered EVERYTHING from some previous course? Didn’t turn out well did it? I used to hate when professors did that. I’d think, “just do a little review, I’ll catch on...damn, now I gotta go brush up on this!” If this stuff is in my major, I shouldn’t have to go back and “brush up on this.” I should know it like I know 2 plus 2 is 4! So what’s the remedy?

The Solution

Review the subject material regularly. Review the subject material regularly. Review the subject material regularly. In case you missed it the first, second, or third time: Review the subject material regularly. Oh, I can already hear the whiners, “Oh, it’s going to take too much time to review a course’s material. We did learn it over an entire semester!” While it is true that you may have learned a course’s material over an entire semester, it’s untrue that your review of that material will take time commensurate with the time it took you to initially learn the material. When you’re really ready to rock a final exam, can’t you review an entire course worth of material in far less than a day? Why is this possible? Well a big part of the answer is that as the material becomes more and more ingrained in you, you get faster and faster at reviewing the material because your brain is able to chunk so much of the material. The material no longer resembles a vast palace, but a miniature castle that can fit in the palm of your hand. How long would it take you to review material from an Algebra course? Thought so.

The Mechanics of Reviewing

There’s no one right way to review. Do what works for you. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably thrown away many of the materials from your different relevant courses. No worry. Simply build up your knowledge base from scratch. But this time, make it question driven. Start with something that you sort of remember but should totally remember as a person with a degree (or will soon have a degree) in field X. As you find out the answer to this question, more questions will start to come to you. I’m a big fan of the questions driven model to reviewing. Why? Because via this method, you actually start to *really* feel educated. There’s something deeply satisfying about answering your OWN questions.

I like taking my notes in a modified Cornell Note-taking fashion. This way, I can cover up the answers that are on the right side of the page, and quiz myself with questions that are on the left side of the page. My version of the Cornell Note-taking system has no summary section at the bottom of each page.

In the Final Analysis

It only makes sense to put effort toward remembering material you so assiduously toiled to obtain. You paid the price to acquire the material through time, effort, frustration, and money. To forget the material is to flush it all down the toilet. And if you were just going to flush it all down the toilet, why’d the hell did you learn it in the first place?!? Yes, I’ll concede that at times you’re forced to learn things that have no applicability to you and your life (at least in your opinion). But what about that stuff that you “know” IS relevant to you and your life? Do you know that stuff cold? Then shoot, I say give yourself that gift.

How to Solve Really Hard Problems

Interested in the secret to solving really hard problems and understanding tough concepts?  It's really simple.  So simple, in fact, it can be summed up in a single word.   Instead of calling problems you encounter in papers, class, problem sets, exams, or research "hard," call them "INTERESTING." 

This single, seemingly insignificant, change in word choice is one commonality I notice in faculty and many sharp graduate students.  I can recall many times being in a graduate course, and a Professor would describe a hella tough concept as being really interesting.  In my head, I'd think "nooooo, that's really hard, what you mean is that it's really really hard--why do you insist on calling this interesting??"  However, the professors knew better than me.  They knew that if they described problems/concepts as "hard" it would shut down parts of their brain they needed to actually wrap their minds around the problem/concept.    

It really hit me, when I was going over an Algorithms problem set with an advanced graduate student that had been through the course a year or so prior.  He was extremely skilled at Algorithms even though that wasn't his area of focus.  There was a ridiculously contrived and difficult problem I was having issues with solving, and his off base approaches to solving the problem showed that we were in agreement in how ridiculously tough the problem was.  Neither one of us actually solved the problem.  However, he insisted the problem was interesting.  I looked at him as if he was crazy.  He seemed enamored by the problem.  I didn't get it then, and I'm not sure I fully get the whole being enamored part even now.  Nonetheless, running into this problem with him gave me the key insight: people who are really skilled at solving hard problems, describe them as interesting.  

You now know the secret. 

The Invisible Grad

You have come into contact with this person ... you think. They are that one person in your department who you recall seeing once or twice, but you never saw them again. The next time you see this individual (maybe 6 months to a year later), they have good news to report of presentations, publications, and candidacy.You begin to ask yourself, "How are they able to have so many spectacular achievements, yet I never see them in the department?". The reason that they get so much work done is due to the fact that you never see them.

Introducing the Invisible Grad

Once a certain point has been reached within your research as a PhD student, one should become relatively autonomous and not need to come into the lab as much as your less experienced colleagues. Who would want to come into the lab anyway? It's counterproductive and full of distractions. In the office, my days would typically end up looking like this:

9:00 - start work

11:00 - fire drill

12:00 - get dragged out of your lab for lunch with other students

1:30 - return from lunch

3:00 - department seminar/lecture

5:00 - time to leave! (after all, you HAVE worked an 8 hour day)

* Note: i haven't even factored in teaching/office hours for those of us who have classes as well as other graduate student popping into the lab to "shoot the breeze".

Away from the lab (perhaps at home, a coffee shop, library) these distractions are virtually non existent allowing more time to concentrate on the real reason you are in grad school, to do research! Take some advice from the Invisible Grad, and disappear from the distractions and emerge with PROGRESS !!!