I’m writing this in response to a blog post by The NewPI. She recently gave a talk at a
meeting and left feeling pretty bad about it. This wasn’t because anything particularly bad happened, but
rather, she didn’t feel like it was as exciting as it could have been, and also
because she didn’t really get much positive feedback.
I have felt exactly the same way after every talk I’ve given
since becoming a PI three years ago.
Seriously. Every time. But I’ve had two eye-opening
experiences recently that I thought might be worth sharing.
First, a couple weeks ago I went to a work-in-progress
seminar for an assistant professor who is new to our institution and
department, though she is quite an accomplished scientist. A day or two after the seminar, she
stopped by my office to ask if I would be willing to do a peer evaluation of
her lecture. She went on to say
that she felt like she had disappointed everyone because no one said anything
to her after her talk. It was like it was as though people just ignored the fact that
she had just given this seminar that to her was a major milestone. She wanted feedback about how she could
improve. I was SHOCKED to say the
least. Why? Because her seminar was fantastic! It was clear and full of new and
interesting data. So I told her
this, and then realized that nobody in our department ever tells each other that
they did a good job. As a matter
of fact, the people who get the most affirmation after giving a talk in our
department are usually people who do a really bad job! This was kind of a revelation for me when
I realized that maybe all of MY bad talks aren’t really as bad as I think they
are!
Second, I was invited to give a talk at a nearby fancy
teaching hospital. They have a
seminar series where a clinician presents background and a clinical case, and then
a researcher presents whatever they’re doing in their lab to address this
clinical problem. The audience is
pretty much a 50:50 mix of physicians and researchers. The seminar counts for CME credit for
the physicians, so I totally felt like I had to spin my research in the most clinically
relevant way possible. This isn’t
much of a stretch for my work, but I’m not at all used to presenting it in this
way or to this type of audience.
My portion of the seminar was also only supposed to be 20 minutes, so it
was really challenging to explain things adequately. While I was talking I felt like I was bombing the whole
time. People were
getting up and leaving or standing up to get more pizza or looked like they
were falling asleep. Then at the
end, all the questions were for the clinician and not me. And as I was leaving, no one said
anything to me at all. It’s just
such a strange feeling to be the center of attention as a seminar speaker and then be almost completely
ignored after it's over. I had been so anxious
about this talk for months and I left feeling like I had completely
failed. Fast forward two weeks,
and it turns out that as part of the CME credit requirements, the physicians in
attendance filled out evaluation forms for both of us. This was in a huge auditorium full of people and I got ranked all 9's and 10's for
almost every aspect of the talk that they evaluated. I seriously could not stop smiling for the rest of the day! I was SO WRONG about how I had done. I became
even more convinced that lack of feedback after a talk and people ignoring you are probably strong indicators that you did a GOOD job.
So, New PI, you probably did a lot better than you think!
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