postdoc life

Between November of 2005 and June of 2006 I gave four public talks, two of which were one-hour "job talks" and two were 20-minute conference talks. I could do it in my sleep by the end of it all.

Tomorrow I am giving my first quasi-public talk since June of '06, which suddenly seems like a really long time ago. I'm rusty, and my project is very, very different both conceptually and technically than what I was doing before.

Even though I was working on slides into the wee hours of last night (a pretty rare event for me since graduating) and pretty much every second of today that I wasn't walking down the hall for more coffee and/or to go to the bathroom--I never really got nervous. I just ran through the talk for the benefit of my dog and the dining room wall for the second time, after cutting a few slides out, and still ran 3 minutes over. I'm still not nervous.

Here's why:

2 things have happened every time I've given a talk, going all the way back to my first year of grad school:

1) Everyone tells me I did a good job.
2) I am never satisfied with the job I did.

Now...I have no doubt that plenty of people have found my talks boring, others have found them disorganized and awkward, and even a few may have found them to be simply and laughably naive. I have no doubt about this, because these are my top three reactions to most of the talks I've heard. "Pretty good" comes in fourth, followed by "I really, genuinely enjoyed that" in a--very--distant fifth.

What I'm saying here is that the source of any pre-talk anxiety I might feel is the thought that I'm talking to a room full of people just like me.

So why don't I worry?

What's the point? I know most people will say nothing to me at all about it, a few will give me a compliment, my boss--whose job it is to critique me--will couch any criticism in the most positive light, but more than likely just tell me I did a good job, and I won't be happy with it regardless.

Just once, I would love it if one of my colleagues would come up to me and say something like, "yeah, you had me at the beginning when you were talking about general stuff, but once you got into data I just kind of checked out and thought about what I was going to have for lunch...your slides had a nicely balanced color scheme, though, and it sounded like you didn't say 'um' too much. So I guess you did OK. But I really don't care."

Anyway, check this space tomorrow to see if I am writing about being careful about what you wish for.