This seems like the opposite of why or how I would go for talks. Seminars are the biggest part of academic life I miss on the other side. Hearing smart people talk about genuinely interesting topics in great detail is not something you can see much in tech circles.
After years of doing it I classified talks as of two types: first is where you know you want to listen to this person because that topic is already of great interest and you’re looking for the details. You already know how pluripotent stem cells came about but it was fun to hear Shinya Yamanaka describe the actual experiments and how they came about. Or perhaps it’s your competitors presenting their latest “ready to be public” findings where you’re trying to read between each line and dot in figures to guess what else they have up their sleeves they haven’t published yet.
The second category is of talks where you have some interest or hook but that’s it. Maybe it’s a Nobel laureate (I can assure you most Nobel talks are the most boring and useless ones you can go to). Maybe it’s an obscure topic but has some interesting keyword that intrigued you. So you just go there. Perhaps you get totally captivated in that talk, perhaps you learn some nuggets of information that you never knew about, but perhaps worst of all you zone out quickly because it’s too arcane or boring.
I still see the second category as the most rewarding. Maybe you’re bored in the talk, but that puts you in a place where you typically can’t leave, someone’s yapping and seeding your random thought generator with kernels of factoids that your imagination can run wild in. I often come out of these talks with other ideas only vaguely related. Some other times I’d have refined some of my own project ideas since I have nothing better to do.
None of these trials and tribulations have anything to gain from a contrived exercise to jot three things down though.
I think this is more targeted at new graduate students.
I remember when I first started my PhD, literally all of the talks were completely over my head, and I did not understand enough to engage as you describe here :)
Gathering three key takeaways would already require a good deal of effort :) and, I appreciate that the author of this post absolves you of having to have the speaker’s message as a key takeaway, since as a beginner grad student that is frequently beyond reach.
Do you think there’s a “shortcut” though? Sure most everyone (though not all) starts clueless at the start of grad school, but either you get the science or you don’t, my experience is that a good majority of scientists today never actually get science and just play the part (even to themselves) of someone who’s figured it out.
After years of doing it I classified talks as of two types: first is where you know you want to listen to this person because that topic is already of great interest and you’re looking for the details. You already know how pluripotent stem cells came about but it was fun to hear Shinya Yamanaka describe the actual experiments and how they came about. Or perhaps it’s your competitors presenting their latest “ready to be public” findings where you’re trying to read between each line and dot in figures to guess what else they have up their sleeves they haven’t published yet.
The second category is of talks where you have some interest or hook but that’s it. Maybe it’s a Nobel laureate (I can assure you most Nobel talks are the most boring and useless ones you can go to). Maybe it’s an obscure topic but has some interesting keyword that intrigued you. So you just go there. Perhaps you get totally captivated in that talk, perhaps you learn some nuggets of information that you never knew about, but perhaps worst of all you zone out quickly because it’s too arcane or boring.
I still see the second category as the most rewarding. Maybe you’re bored in the talk, but that puts you in a place where you typically can’t leave, someone’s yapping and seeding your random thought generator with kernels of factoids that your imagination can run wild in. I often come out of these talks with other ideas only vaguely related. Some other times I’d have refined some of my own project ideas since I have nothing better to do.
None of these trials and tribulations have anything to gain from a contrived exercise to jot three things down though.