In an ideal world scientists prepare their conference talk way ahead of time. In a realistic world they prepare their talk one or two days before they get on the plane. Or they do it on the plane. In earlier days,  when a presentation was done with the help of overhead projectors, transparencies that were very clearly made while being in the air were referred to as “air-plane transparencies”. These slides showed all the signs of shaky fingers. In this post I will tell you something about my last-minute preparations for my latest presentation.

Laptop with a screen crash
I used to present my talks using a Dell laptop. Reliable, sturdy and so heavy that additional physical exercises were not necessary. About two  weeks before my conference in Crete would start the unexpected happened: my laptop had a crash, that is to say the screen stopped working and even hooking up an additional monitor did not save me. I only lost about a few hours of work. I always backup my data regularly so this little damage was a reward for my consistent backup procedure.

Let’s take a (not so) hypothetical situation: assume you hold some kind of responsibility in your group. You might the the principal investigator, a researcher or even just an experienced post-doc; the important part is that you are somehow responsible (morally if not practically) for people hierarchically below you.

Let’s also assume that a new PhD student (or, as a limiting case, a fresh post-doc) enter your group. The path he/she took to reach your group can vary enormously from country to country so let’s skip it. The main point is that you don’t really know this person but you have some good reason to believe he/she will do good.

The first few months are there to allow your new PhD student to get used to the new place, the new subject, the new “way of doing things” and so on. After some time passed you expect him/her to become productive. After all he/she is no more a undergrad student and is reasonable that, given some guidance, he/she will start conducting an experiment (or at least a part of it). After all the very reason you took in a new PhD student is because you need people working.

The United States is the premier example of a country where people move, and indeed move all over the country, if by doing so they get a better job. This professional mobility also applies to scientists. The country has invented a lot of mechanisms to ease these relocations.

Scientists move because they get a chance to start their own research group. Or they change affiliation because the new place offers a better scientific environment. Or offers a higher salary. For some scientists moving is very simple. A philosopher or a theoretical physicists just has to bring a few books to his new place and he is all set. For a scientist who works for a giant organization as Fermilab bringing his laboratory to the new location is impossible. But how about those scientists that have acquired movable pieces of equipment and apparatuses as a result of their successful grant applications? The scientists need this equipment to be able to pursue their research successfully in the new place. In the United States the rule is very simple: wherever the principal investigator (PI) is going - even if it is abroad - he is allowed to take with him all of his equipment. In my opinion this is the correct attitude.

Last month, I had a research proposal rejected. I’ll keep a brave face and say that it might be a good thing as it shows that, no, really, I do not get them all funded. But really, it’s a pain the behind, of course, and a huge waste of time. About a month-and-a-bit wasted to be precise.

Last week, my wife accused me of being rude. Not so much to her – although it’s quite possible that I am, she’s probably got used to it by now – but to others. This sort of happened because our son, Guus, is going to nursery school soon and we were interviewed by the head of the nursery school. She extolled the virtues of their bulletproof entrance door, which (according to her) had become a necessity since Dunblane. In case you don’t remember, “Dunblane” refers to a town in Scotland where in 1996 a mad man entered a school and shot dead several kids. Terrible obviously. However, I couldn’t help myself and started arguing that this was silly and that surely because this happened once in Britain, this was extremely unlikely to happen again, let alone at the particular nursery school that my child was about to attend. Her answer: “Belgium”. Clearly referring to another more recent occasion where a child was hurt. At this point, I decided to give up, judging that further discussion of probabilities or, say, Bayes theorem or shot noise wouldn’t really go over very well.

My example presentation
When discussing quality of presentations it helps a lot to discuss on the basis of example presentations. An example presentation is exactly what this post is about. Although I do not expect all the readers of this blog to be interested in the content of my talk, it would probably not harm to sketch the context of this speech. About a year ago I gave a 25minute presentation for an audience of about 75 physics PhD students. That day was organized by the Dutch science-supporting agency FOM especially for the students. The program included workshops on presentations, on writing papers and on career planning. I was the last, plenary,  speaker, just before the good-bye drink. My task was to give them a flavor, possibly with some humor, of what it means to pursue an academic career.

Technical aspects
The idea of posting this presentation is to show some technical details:

When you are doing research, you tend to collect a lot of papers. I remember that at the end of m PhD, when I moved to another continent to do a postdoc, I dumped a huge box of photocopies in my parents’ basement. A few years ago, I had collected two cupboards full of photocopies. It was getting seriously out of hand. Then, of course, journals started putting everything online as PDFs and the same process started all over again but this time filling up hard disk folders instead. I used to have subject-based folders, which sort of worked until something fit within 2 or 3 or 4 of my subjects. Searching for some old paper you had read a few years back became more and more nightmarish. Then somebody showed me Papers.

In an ideal world you finish high school having a very clear idea on what you want to do in your life. Then you opt for the very best university in that field, you graduate with very high grades and then you apply for a PhD in a fantastic group in a different university (in a different country). By the time you finish your PhD you accumulated a decent amount of (nicely cited) publications and people in your scientific community start to know about you. At this point you apply for a post-doc somewhere else (once again a fantastic group in a different country) and start your unstoppable run to the top.

Today I want to discuss some of the arguments that should play a role in the decision for students to send  out an application to a particular principal investigator in a particular institute in, very often, a foreign country.

Mobility
How mobile should a junior scientist be? I know some very successful scientists that went to high school, college and university in the same city. And even became professor at that university, with as their research theme a continuous iteration of their PhD thesis. But I think they form a minority.

Leaving your own university, or even your country
The majority of junior scientists struggle. Should they leave their country? And if so, at what level of their education? Leaving one’s country is usually either done to get a PhD abroad, or to get first a master abroad and then a PhD abroad. But even if staying in the same country the question arises whether or not one should continue to go for a PhD in the same group where the master degree was acquired.

As a student in a traditional condensed matter physics group, I was taught for many years that for every conference you visit, you write an article for the proceedings. In my experience it was mainly seen as a gesture to the organizers and to the community. Several times I have responded to the request of organizations like SPIE to contribute a 10-page article to a conference. In later years I was surprised to find out that this attitude toward proceedings is not shared among all researchers. So what is the role of conference proceedings in the present scientific system, should we write them, are they a waste of time, or are they perhaps worse than that?

Why proceedings may be useful
Conference proceedings have fulfilled several useful functions in the past. A conference volume provided a sense of community; by contributing one is acknowledged as an active member of the field. Conference volumes were distributed among the community in hardcopy, in which case they provided reference material for workers in the field. Thus it was an effective way of addressing the relevant people. Proceedings were a way of getting one’s work known in the community before major results were published in a peer reviewed paper. Finally, proceedings can be used to provide background information or to present data which would otherwise not be published elsewhere.