Chan's Personal Blog

Every Friday, all members of the software engineering research lab attends a colloquium which is intended to offer a free exchange of ideas. It also allows other people to get a sense of what you're doing for your research. The deal is, one person presents their research topic per week.

So today was the second time they had this colloquium this term. The topic of the day was about using a mathematical model of vectors to model software concerns. As the presentation progressed, I found myself completely lost about what the research was really about. The presentation was dabbled with scary math notation, foreign acronymns, big words, etc.

One thing that I observed is that some people need to learn some interpersonal skills when it comes to exchanging ideas. There were two people that were asking seemingly hostile questions to the presenter. One of the profs remarked, "I don't see how this is useful at all." I know if I was presenting and a professor said that about my research, I'd probably have an involuntary bowel movement right away. I think people should perhaps sugar coat their questions, or at least offer a suggestion of how to improve the research.

Anyways, after forty minutes, the presentation finished, and I retreated to my research office. The thought that kept going on my head was, am I the only one that doesn't understand this presentation? Did I forget to take the "mathematical model of vectors to model software concerns" course while I was an undergraduate? So, I asked one of the guys in my research group if he had any idea what was going on in that presentation, and he responded with a resounding no. Thank God I'm not the only one! I asked another guy, and he too said he had no idea what that presentation was about. They explained that there are many different research topics, and no one's expected to be knowledgable in everything. People in grad school tend to specialize on a few topics, so no one's expected to be the jack-of-all-trades computer scientist .... except maybe the profs.

In either case, I'm relieved and feel less stupid.

Today I gave my very first presentation at the graduate school level. At first I was sort of nervous as this was a thirty minute presentation in front of some very smart people. The night before, I was tossing and turning in bed so I did not sleep well.

In either case, I gave the presentation tonight and it went fairly well (although I haven't received feedback from my peers yet). I thought it was a good mix of content and humour, and some very good discussion came out of it. At first I was nervous as I had prepared 22 slides, and within the first five minutes I had already went through 6 slides. However, the intro was the more boring part of the presentation. Discussions started breaking out during the meat of my content as expected. My presentation lasted 35 minutes which is about right.

Anyways, doing a presentation at the graduate level is quite different from other presentations I had given in the past. This class is setup as a seminar style class, where students give presentations on research papers that they read. All students are expected to read the paper ahead of time, and the presenter is supposed to facilitate discussions. So, people are free to make comments throughout the talk which makes the experience more interactive and interesting. The conversation felt very relaxed, casual, and natural as we got into it. Everyone seemed quite supportive and respective of each other during the discussion.

A supportive audience is very different from my undergraduate experience. In business for example, the presentation is supposed to be very professional (ie you have to dress up), and you talk the whole time, and you leave time at the end for questions. The audience waits for the end like vultures circling its prey. During question period, you're hit with hard questions or opinions which are intended to poke holes in your business plan, and you pray to merely survive the barrage of questions. Usually before a presentation, I would have a group meeting with my team members to guess what questions will be thrown at us, and develop a strategy of how to answer. We had this one prof, Carter, who was sometimes able to decimate an entire group's belief in their business plan by using a single zinger question. So, the audience seemed very hostile in my business courses.

Presentations in computer science classes weren't much better. There's always some uber-geek who will ask some nit-picky question, or he'll give some obscure tangent question that's supposed to illustrate how stupid and ignorant you are. Once the uber-geek draws first blood, it's all over, all the lesser geeks swarm you with stupid questions as well. Question period is merely an ego building excercise for the uber-geeks. I'll admit I'm guilty of asking some really tough questions as well. In either case, I didn't get any zinger questions from the audience tonight.

The strategy I used for creating this presentation was kind of irrational. I spent a lot of time designing and perfecting a pretty look-and-feel for my Powerpoint slides, even though content is what really mattered. I rationalized it by thinking, even if I crash and burn in the presentation, then at least I have pretty slides. In the end, the content worked wonderfully with the design. I blame this on my web designer origins.

Anyways, the presentation was not as bad as I had imagined. It was actually quite an enjoyable experience. So, this is a small glimpse into grad school, more to come later. (Warning, my opinions are biased as this is the first grad level course I've ever taken ... the honeymoon could end very quickly and/or badly.)

Today I had my first class as a graduate student. I have to say, when I walked into class I was a bit intimidated by the other students, some of them are veteran masters students, others are Ph.D candidates ... me... well, I'm new here. One of the other students actually taught a software engineering course that I took.

While the prof went through the course requirements, he mentioned that there would be two presentations required, and they're about 30-45 minutes long. I'm thinking yikes, how am I going to keep all these uber-smart learned people entertained for half an hour? How am I going to respond to their evil zinger questions? I haven't even taken the grad level course that teaches you how to give presentations properly yet.

My only relief is that this course is on open source systems which I have background in, while some people in the class are completely oblivous to (which is fine). That gives me some ammo for discussion periods at least. So, that's the only ace up my sleeve. The professor also makes references to some articles he read on Slashdot which is fortunate because I read that site everyday as well, and I am able to recall things that I have read on there pretty well. So, hopefully I can stand my ground. I feel like such an undergrad . j/k