I left this part out of yesterday's post, but my talk sucked. Other people told me it was ok, but they were just being nice. I'm not complaining. It serves me right for not preparing like I should.
For those of you who have never been to such a meeting, the presentations can be in two formats. You can give a talk (usually 12 minutes with 3 more for questions) or you can put together a poster that shows your work, and you stand by it to answer questions that anyone may have. Posters are generally easier to present, but they have to be done far enough in advance to be printed in time for the meeting. One of my lab mates asked me why I didn't just do a poster instead and I told him it was because I knew I wouldn't be able to put one together in time to get it printed.
I also told him that even though my talk sucked, I can take solace in the fact that no matter how bad it was, I will never in my life put something together that's as bad as a poster Yang and I saw at my first professional meeting. We had looked through the program the night before, and saw that there was a poster about the ecological interactions between dinosaur species. I think there's something inherently cool about dinosaurs that brings out the little kid in us all, so Yang and I decided that this poster was a must see.
The organizers of these meetings number each poster so that people can just walk around to the ones they want to see without reading them all, so as we walked around the poster session we knew we were coming up on the dinosaur poster. We rounded the corner, and there it was, in all its shameful glory. Instead of a 'real' poster, the author had hung sheets of white paper with the words and pictures drawn on them in crayon. He was sitting on a chair, hunched over with his back turned to the aisle so as to avoid making eye contact with anybody. We kept on walking.
In hindsight, it was probably some sort of psychology experiment where they just wanted to see if people would stop and be nice because they felt bad for the guy or something. I can't imagine why anyone would present something like that otherwise.
When I told my lab mate this story he said "The only way you can do a worse job than that would be to make a poster by mixing pig's blood and ashes and writing it on a cow's hide."
4 comments:
I can't believe that there was actually such a horrid poster! I would have thought the conference admin would have required it to be taken down. They are so anal about other things... I wish I could have seen it though.
And I think the cow hide one would actually have been better!
I did a paper presentation once and it was horrible...I kept losing my train of thought, and would kind of start mumbling things under my breath...It was pretty pathetic.
I had forgotten about that one Minnow. It brought a smile to my face reading about it again. Maybe the guy had decided to get his 3-year-old a head start in the scientific community and let him/her design the poster. All it needed was a kid drawing of a T-rex eating a stegosaurus or something for a figure and the presentation would have been complete.
I usually think my presentations are good, but then people ask questions that make it clear that they have no clue what I am talking about. Or maybe they know what I'm talking about and I don't.
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