Reminder: Don't forget to send in your entry for The Cover Letter contest! There are some great ones so far, but I am sure there are more creative examples lurking out there somewhere.
Sometimes it seems like I could start 93% of my posts with "Not long ago, I was talking to a colleague and.." One might think that I spend a lot of time talking to colleagues. One might be right about this.
In any case, today is one of those 93% of times. Just imagine the usual beginning, blah blah blah..
.. and he reminisced about the time, many many years ago, when I gave an interview talk for a tenure-track faculty position in his department. He says he remembers my talk vividly. I do not remember my talk, vividly or otherwise. I remember the topic of my talk, but that's about all I can come up with for memories of that event.
Fortunately, my colleague's vivid memories are positive ones. One thing he remembers, however, is how short my talk was. In fact, it was 15 minutes shorter than any other candidate's talk. He says it was unusually short. Despite the passage of time, that sort of horrifies me, even though I know the interview had a happy ending (spoiler alert: I was offered the job).
My colleague hastened to tell me that he liked my talk -- and remembers it -- in part because it was short. According to him, I had something to say, and I said it, no more and no less. Everything I said was interesting. (<-- doubtful)
I could probably provide more insight into why my talk was so short if I could remember it more, but in general, talks that are unusually short are much less common than talks that are painfully or inappropriately long. Perhaps I benefited from that fact.
Unusually short talks may result when:
- The speaker freaks out mid-talk and decides to skip over a large(ish) section of the talk. (I don't think this has ever happened to me, but I have seen it.)
- The speaker speaks really really fast and therefore covers the planned material in much less time than intended. (This is not typically a problem for me, and it doesn't seem to have been an issue in my historically short talk).
- The speaker did not practice the talk and greatly underestimated the amount of time it would take to cover the material. (I always practiced my interview talks.)
- The speaker forgets to say a lot of things that s/he intended to say. I don't speak from notes, but I do typically have projected images as visual guides, so in order for this to have a significant effect on the length of a talk, there would likely be lots of forgetting of little points, not a wholesale forgetting of a major component of a talk. (Maybe I did this? I don't remember..)
I really don't know, but I can think of two other things that might have come into play in my case. One is that I had recently given a similar talk to an audience that interrupted me a lot with questions during my talk. If you go from such a setting to one in which you are not interrupted at all, it can affect the length of the talk considerably. Maybe I scaled my talk back, accounting for time for questions during the talk, but there weren't any (?).
Another possibility is that, for this particular talk, I remember that I merged several research projects into one integrated talk. I took some things from my PhD research, some things from my postdoctoral research, and some things I had been thinking about not long before the interview. I wrapped them all up together in what I hoped was a coherent package, and then.. well, I don't remember, but it seems that in the merging, I made the talk shorter rather than longer. That is, I distilled the essence of various projects (perhaps too much), hit the highlights without elaborating on anything in great detail, and gave some idea of where I wanted to go with this type of research in the future.
It seems to have worked in that case, but of course a danger of this approach is appearing as if you are not an expert in anything in particular and prefer to skim the surface of a range of topics. I was fortunate to have a friendly and interested audience in that case, but I can easily imagine this going the other way, and having the primary impression of my short talk be that I didn't have much to say.
It probably matters whether some in the audience know a great deal about your research topic, or not so much. In the case of my epic short talk, the faculty were conducting a search in a field that was not well represented in their department, so maybe it also worked in my favor that I didn't bore them all with the gory details of the research.
Mostly, I think I was just very lucky. A too-long talk is not a good thing, but a too-short talk also has many pitfalls. So, what to do? Perhaps the perfect talk is the slightly-shorter-than-most-people's-too-long talk.
Sometimes it seems like I could start 93% of my posts with "Not long ago, I was talking to a colleague and.." One might think that I spend a lot of time talking to colleagues. One might be right about this.
In any case, today is one of those 93% of times. Just imagine the usual beginning, blah blah blah..
.. and he reminisced about the time, many many years ago, when I gave an interview talk for a tenure-track faculty position in his department. He says he remembers my talk vividly. I do not remember my talk, vividly or otherwise. I remember the topic of my talk, but that's about all I can come up with for memories of that event.
Fortunately, my colleague's vivid memories are positive ones. One thing he remembers, however, is how short my talk was. In fact, it was 15 minutes shorter than any other candidate's talk. He says it was unusually short. Despite the passage of time, that sort of horrifies me, even though I know the interview had a happy ending (spoiler alert: I was offered the job).
My colleague hastened to tell me that he liked my talk -- and remembers it -- in part because it was short. According to him, I had something to say, and I said it, no more and no less. Everything I said was interesting. (<-- doubtful)
I could probably provide more insight into why my talk was so short if I could remember it more, but in general, talks that are unusually short are much less common than talks that are painfully or inappropriately long. Perhaps I benefited from that fact.
Unusually short talks may result when:
- The speaker freaks out mid-talk and decides to skip over a large(ish) section of the talk. (I don't think this has ever happened to me, but I have seen it.)
- The speaker speaks really really fast and therefore covers the planned material in much less time than intended. (This is not typically a problem for me, and it doesn't seem to have been an issue in my historically short talk).
- The speaker did not practice the talk and greatly underestimated the amount of time it would take to cover the material. (I always practiced my interview talks.)
- The speaker forgets to say a lot of things that s/he intended to say. I don't speak from notes, but I do typically have projected images as visual guides, so in order for this to have a significant effect on the length of a talk, there would likely be lots of forgetting of little points, not a wholesale forgetting of a major component of a talk. (Maybe I did this? I don't remember..)
I really don't know, but I can think of two other things that might have come into play in my case. One is that I had recently given a similar talk to an audience that interrupted me a lot with questions during my talk. If you go from such a setting to one in which you are not interrupted at all, it can affect the length of the talk considerably. Maybe I scaled my talk back, accounting for time for questions during the talk, but there weren't any (?).
Another possibility is that, for this particular talk, I remember that I merged several research projects into one integrated talk. I took some things from my PhD research, some things from my postdoctoral research, and some things I had been thinking about not long before the interview. I wrapped them all up together in what I hoped was a coherent package, and then.. well, I don't remember, but it seems that in the merging, I made the talk shorter rather than longer. That is, I distilled the essence of various projects (perhaps too much), hit the highlights without elaborating on anything in great detail, and gave some idea of where I wanted to go with this type of research in the future.
It seems to have worked in that case, but of course a danger of this approach is appearing as if you are not an expert in anything in particular and prefer to skim the surface of a range of topics. I was fortunate to have a friendly and interested audience in that case, but I can easily imagine this going the other way, and having the primary impression of my short talk be that I didn't have much to say.
It probably matters whether some in the audience know a great deal about your research topic, or not so much. In the case of my epic short talk, the faculty were conducting a search in a field that was not well represented in their department, so maybe it also worked in my favor that I didn't bore them all with the gory details of the research.
Mostly, I think I was just very lucky. A too-long talk is not a good thing, but a too-short talk also has many pitfalls. So, what to do? Perhaps the perfect talk is the slightly-shorter-than-most-people's-too-long talk.