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[lackademia]

"Something for nobody" might be interesting in the context of a poem or a philosophic meditation, but in the context of a teaching demonstration it is simply ridiculous. 

[aysecik]

Thank you everyone for the feedback! It is indeed quite helpful. And thank you for the support! I still think that making these explanations easy and obvious is harder work and took a LOT of practice with many very different audiences. I absolutely love teaching, and I think I am pretty good at it (so say my students), and I try to carry that over to all my presentations. That said, if I give the impression that what I did was obvious, that is not a good thing for me as a candidate.

To clarify, I don't think the comment was meant to be very negative in context. In fact, the professor said that the depth was noticeable from how I answered the questions, but others might think it was a project that was obvious. I think he was trying to give a constructive kind of feedback. Taken literally, it is quite annoying. But I will try to take it as a heads-up for a potential pit-fall for me, and make myself better, at least in playing by the rules.

About teaching, I agree very much. I take pride in making complicated things simple. It may, as many say, be cultural (it probably is, as I am from a highly ranked R-1 and saw attitudes of many). I am not willing to change my style to show off how much I know (I honestly don't think I can), but maybe I should take the time to go more in depth with a few things. Not be mysterious or opaque on purpose, but emphasize a few things in more detail to show there were actually many things that fed to my approach.

One colleague suggested I add a slide with some sort of mathematical equation fit (I am a pretty experimental person, and it takes so much longer to explain such formulas to my personal satisfaction to fit into this type of a presentation) - I feel that would be forced. I think I will stick with doing my best to be clear, but adding a bit more about how many parameters fed to me getting the exceptional results I ended up getting. I just hope I don't go over time.

Thank you all once again!

P.S. It was especially great to get a response to this post from "dr. nobody" - maybe I did have something for nobody in the end:)

[drnobody]

P.S. It was especially great to get a response to this post from "dr. nobody" - maybe I did have something for nobody in the end:)

I have to admit when I saw it, I had to read it. I have become so used to my own name on here, I actually thought maybe it was for me. The fora: an alternate reality!

[zyzzx]

I think I can see where the comment is coming from. It is commendable to make your talk understandable to everyone, but it sounds like you do that by skipping a lot of the technical details. Could you pull back the curtain just a bit and show that there are some technical details, even if you don't have time to explain them properly? You could even say that: "Now, to explain this properly would probably take all week, but I wanted to show this to give you a sense of the complicated stuff in my method."

I used to have a talk about a numerical model that I did, and I put in a slide with the equations that I used. They were gnarly equations, taking up the entire slide. I made a little joke about sparing them complicated math, pointed out that my model was analytical, and highlighted the variables in the equations, showing how many different ones there were. I could have just stated those things without showing the math, but having the equations in the background illustrated that there was some substance behind what I was doing.

If they don't understand a technique or two that you quickly mention - well, they didn't understand it in the version where you didn't mention it either, so it's not like it would take away from the understandability of your overall talk.

And remember, a research presentation for a job is, to some extent, all about showing off what you know and what you can do. Not saying to be opaque on purpose so that you look smart, but you do want to get across that you do have experience and expertise in all these difficult and complicated techniques.

[polly_mer]

Having sat through far, far too many talks where the math was flashed for an instant (too fast to even read, let alone understand), I don't recommend doing that just to show that you have math.

Either put up the gnarly equation and explain it thoroughly for a grad student or skip the math to instead say something like "The equation is a full page and that's too much for this talk.  Qualitatively, the standard equation has three parts <show slide with the three parts written in a qualitative sense>.  My work focuses on modifying this part to show the friction resulting from having long molecules as being different than friction in small molecules."

A person can hint at the complexity while still keeping the talk aimed at a non-specialist audience.  Even for a specialist audience, generally I don't show a ton of math.  Instead I say, "As we all remember from the BigName-HugeName-Neverheardfromagain model, <blah>.  I'm modifying <blah> to <bleh> because ..."

[aysecik]

Thank you so much! I agree with what you say. My talk was still technical, but maybe I ended up skipping certain details to save time. I think while presenting, I will expand upon certain aspects in more detail so people notice the thought that went into designing the system/material I worked with. That was what a lot of the questions from faculty were about anyway, at least those who were working with sort of similar materials (nobody from my exact sub-field plus I am very interdisciplinary, which is why they would consider hiring me but it also makes finding the happy medium more difficult). Calibrating language up is much easier than calibrating down - I can manage that!

As for equations: I am not a very mathematical person. I can use math as a tool, but I am not one of the people who think in math as a language. I hate it when people have a whole slide with equations to skip over. I do like polly_mer's approach: Show the equation but focus on what matters in the equation: A scaling law? Orders of magnitude? Different contributions? This is the equation, but THIS is what it tells me, and see, it fits my data! Or, this version fits my data, which means that this is happening during this process. That is my personal preference - I know it differs between people, and different personalities make different versions work.

[username2]

In contrast to showing models on the slides, I would encourage you to just send this person a PDF of the paper, which will have all the math, and then you have the best of both worlds. Again, I would only worry about your style if you find that someone who knows you agrees with this person's assessment, because if this was just a random comment, there's no need to change.

[zyzzx]

As for equations: I am not a very mathematical person. I can use math as a tool, but I am not one of the people who think in math as a language. I hate it when people have a whole slide with equations to skip over. I do like polly_mer's approach: Show the equation but focus on what matters in the equation: A scaling law? Orders of magnitude? Different contributions? This is the equation, but THIS is what it tells me, and see, it fits my data! Or, this version fits my data, which means that this is happening during this process. That is my personal preference - I know it differs between people, and different personalities make different versions work.

Yes, maybe I didn't articulate it properly, but this is what I was trying to say. You can show equations (or whatever technical details), and use them to make a point, without necessarily explaining them thoroughly. In my case the equations made the point that, in a field where many numerical models are black box codes with a million variables, my model was based on a few equations with few variables. There was no need for the audience to understand any more than that, and I told them so, but having the visual up there helped drive the point home.

If many of the questions were about depth, that does suggest that a portion of the audience was looking for that. Maybe use the questions as a guide for thinking about types of detail to add.