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[ptarmigan]

Ah, yes. I know the type of thing you guys are talking about, and I haven't observed that in our department so far. I'm talking about questions or comments motivated by curiosity and interest or by confusion (sometimes due to a mistake by the speaker, sometimes to a misunderstanding).

[imawakenow]

I just want to chime in here about questions during job talks:

While I recognize that some people ask questions to glorify or amuse themselves, other people ask difficult and challenging questions to see if a candidate knows what he or she is talking about. I've seen more than one candidate collapse like a house of cards once he or she got away from the prepared script.

And, of course, there are both discipline- and department-specific norms that can serve as a guide.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

ptarmigan, be very careful about generalizing from one department to the next;  there are definite cultural differences between departments (just as there are between fields).  Of the many departments where I have taught, two polar opposites come to mind, both excellent large R1s within an afternoon drive of one another.  At one, it is the culture to start hammering the speaker with questions almost immediately, at the other it is rare to ask questions before the end of the talk, except to clear up a real misunderstanding.  This is independent of the comparative brilliance of the members of the two audiences.

Likewise, where I was a grad student there were some faculty who always jumped in as you describe, others who held back, and the latter group contained both the weakest and the very strongest people in the department. - DvF

[lasquires]

ptarmigan, this is just a thought which you are free to dismiss if it doesn't seem applicable: I wonder if the reason you keep coming back to this one concern is that you are either not getting or are not adept at reading the kinds of social cues that might help you be more certain about where you stand in your department or in your relationships with your mentors. Now, I think on some level this is an existential condition for graduate students, but knowing your place and judging behavioral norms may be particularly difficult for you for a number of reasons. It's possible you're not getting the kind of approval or even permission you might be seeking for your particular way of doing things in order to feel ok. It's possible that you don't feel that you quite fit in in your department, and you are looking for reasons why, and you are seeing that That Person fits in and she does X, but you thought X wasn't ok, but she's being rewarded for X, and you don't understand why when YOU do X it's different. Or whatever.

But if that's at least a somewhat accurate approximation of the case, you can only really do what seems reasonable to you. Speak up if you have a question or a comment in class that can't be answered by looking at the syllabus or referring to last week's notes and IF the professor is open to taking those sorts of comments. Do watch what seasoned academics do in situations like job talks, but weigh their behavior against common sense as well as some consciousness as to how you would like to be treated if you were the speaker, etc. Academic etiquette can be very complicated, and, as others have said, it varies from department to department, discipline to discipline, and situation to situation. And it is important to acquire the social skills essential to success in your field, but it seems like, at bottom, this thread also testifies to a certain amount of insecurity and a need for someone to give you concrete approval or permission for your behavior, and that's probably not going to happen.

[ptarmigan]

I appreciate what you're saying, Lasquires (congrats on the defense, by the way!) I actually feel relatively secure in my department and don't have any concerns anymore about my classroom behavior. I just thought of this old thread in light of more recent observations and thought it was interesting.

[lasquires]

I appreciate what you're saying, Lasquires (congrats on the defense, by the way!) I actually feel relatively secure in my department and don't have any concerns anymore about my classroom behavior. I just thought of this old thread in light of more recent observations and thought it was interesting.

Understood, and I'm glad that your current position is solid. This discussion just resonated with me a bit because seemed similar to one I was having with a colleague earlier.

[bookishone]

I just want to chime in here about questions during job talks:

While I recognize that some people ask questions to glorify or amuse themselves, other people ask difficult and challenging questions to see if a candidate knows what he or she is talking about. I've seen more than one candidate collapse like a house of cards once he or she got away from the prepared script.

And, of course, there are both discipline- and department-specific norms that can serve as a guide.

Tough questions at job talks can also function like the hardest questions in a test like the SAT, which I was always told "includes a range of difficulty, with some questions they don't expect anyone to answer," to help differentiate ability. So, it could be that a tough question gets asked at a job talk without, really, the expectation that the candidate will be able to totally nail the answer, given the fact that they're still finishing their PhD or have only just started their second project or whatever. But the way they work toward an answer for a tough question can tell you a lot about how well they're trained, how well they know the field, and how their mind works. [This to reassure job candidates who may be worrying about not being able to answer every question perfectly].

[polly_mer]

I just want to chime in here about questions during job talks:

While I recognize that some people ask questions to glorify or amuse themselves, other people ask difficult and challenging questions to see if a candidate knows what he or she is talking about. I've seen more than one candidate collapse like a house of cards once he or she got away from the prepared script.

And, of course, there are both discipline- and department-specific norms that can serve as a guide.

Tough questions at job talks can also function like the hardest questions in a test like the SAT, which I was always told "includes a range of difficulty, with some questions they don't expect anyone to answer," to help differentiate ability. So, it could be that a tough question gets asked at a job talk without, really, the expectation that the candidate will be able to totally nail the answer, given the fact that they're still finishing their PhD or have only just started their second project or whatever. But the way they work toward an answer for a tough question can tell you a lot about how well they're trained, how well they know the field, and how their mind works. [This to reassure job candidates who may be worrying about not being able to answer every question perfectly].

At a previous employer, one particular person was invited to a lot of job talks for that reason.  Even without prompting, he would pound on a candidate over details or related topics and then everyone would get to see how the candidate performed under pressure.  

After the job talk was over if the candidate performed well on the superficial, remained-composed-and-tossed-the-questions-back-to-the-pounder level, the chair or senior member of the search committee would privately ask someone qualified in the research area if the pounder had valid points to illustrate weaknesses in the work or whether the pounder was just being himself.  Unfortunately for a couple of the candidates, when I was asked if the pounder was identifying genuine weak points, I had to say, "Yes.  That's not just X being X."  For other people, though, I got to say, "The work is solid and X was simply pushing on the fact that the work done wasn't the project that he would do in that area if he had the time, energy, and money".

[seniorscholar]

At a previous employer, one particular person was invited to a lot of job talks for that reason.  Even without prompting, he would pound on a candidate over details or related topics and then everyone would get to see how the candidate performed under pressure.  

We used to have a jolly friendly professor (who, alas, died too young) who would always volunteer to be on the mock interviews we set up for PhD candidates on the job market "If," he would say, "I get to be the person who asks the difficult and unanswerable questions." I hope it was useful to the doctoral students who suffered through it, though some of them left the room in near tears.

(The student's supervisor never served on these "interview committees" -- as far as possible, they were made up of 3 or 4 faculty members who had not taught the student at all.)

[sugaree]

My grad dept. had an old grizzly prof who used to sit and read the newspaper (an actual newspaper, not online) during job talks and whisper to his neighbors. I think it was his attempt to see how candidates could deal with unruly students. Or, maybe he was just being a jerk. Could go either way with that guy (although weirdly, I really liked him as a prof in spite of his obnoxious ways, or maybe because of them?).

He was listening, though, as he usually asked candidates zinger questions during the Q & A. His zinger questions were particularly effective, as they were not the typical "here's my area of research and what do you know about it?" types, but rather were on point with the candidate's presentation. Probably because he had been at it so long he knew a lot about everything, it seemed. Candidates who could deal with him tended to do very well, those who were thrown were not automatically out of the running, but created some skepticism among the ranks.

 I don't know how the job candidates felt about it, but as a grad student I very much appreciated seeing this kind of behavior so I could later anticipate a challenging, worst-case-scenario in my own future job talks. And I never encountered anything like what my department put candidates through.  

[psyche74]

Does it sound like I'm behaving inappropriately? 

No way--you're driven to speak by your academic interest, which is exactly what should flourish in academia, no matter what department it is.

Of course, I'm one of those obnoxious people, too...

[macadamia]

Women in mathematics can get very mixed social signals, so don't let yourself be easily convinced that this is about your failure at reading social cues.

Don't be afraid of asking stupid questions, always try to ask constructive questions to further your knowledge, not questions to trip someone up. Don't let anyone here discourage you from asking interested questions, just because someone else asks mean-intentioned trip-up questions or questions whose only purpose is to display the brilliance of the asker.

There *are* obnoxious students who don't stop interrupting. If you were my obnoxious student, the telltale sign would be that I asked you to stop several times.

I come from a interruption-friendly culture and I feel unhappy if there are no reactions from an audience.
You seem like the perfect grad student to me.

You *should* respect local culture and wait until the end of a talk if this is how it is done in a department.