Here's a good (but long) essay by Phil Agre on professional skills,
targeted at academics and researchers but has stuff that could be
useful to anyone: networking, conference skills (attending and
presenting), talking about your work, etc.
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html
I think I found it linked from mjd's useful and entertaining
"Conference Presentation Judo" talk:
http://perl.plover.com/yak/#pjudo
I have only skimmed it so far, but here are some good bits:
> Socializing at conferences
:
> The most basic skill for attending conferences is talking to
> other researchers about your work. They will ask you, "What do
> you work on?", and you need to be able to answer this question
> any time, to anyone, at any length. This is amazingly hard, and
> you may end up kicking yourself at your stammering non-answers.
> That's fine; it's part of the process. You should rehearse
> answers to this question before attending conferences. Your local
> research group may not be helpful; since they already know what
> you're working and share all of your assumptions, you rarely need
> to explain yourself at a basic level to them. A good test is
> whether you can explain your research topic to an artist (unless
> your field is art, in which case you need to explain it to a
> mechanical engineer). Explaining it to your family is good, too.
> Try practicing ten-second explanations, one-minute explanations,
> five-minute explanations, and so on, up to a full-length talk.
>
> The hardest part, however, is tailoring your explanation to your
> audience, and this is an area where you should invest sustained,
> structured effort. [...] Try to avoid explaining your
> work to a complete stranger. Instead, get them to talk first. And
> while they are talking, work to identify specific elements that
> your respective research interests share in common. (By the way,
> the phrase "I am interested in ..." actually means "I am
> conducting research on ...".) Perhaps you both employ qualitative
> research methods. Perhaps you are both doing comparative work.
> Perhaps you both have a political agenda, even if maybe not the
> same one. Perhaps you are both studying the history of a certain
> region, or a certain century, or a certain industry, even if
> other elements of your research topics are different. Perhaps you
> are both aiming your work at industrial applications. With
> practice, you will begin to spot the commonalities at a greater
> distance.
>
> Once you have identified the commonalities between your two
> projects, fashion an explanation of your own project that puts
> the common elements in the foreground, and leaves the other
> elements in the background. For example, if you are using
> economic theories to study the Mongolians, and the other person
> is using cultural theories to study the Mongolians, put the
> Mongolians in the foreground; tell them what sources of evidence
> you're using, what particular people and places you're looking
> at, and so on, and then mention along the way that you're using
> some economic ideas to look at those things. On the other hand,
> if you are using economic theories to study the Mongolians, and
> the other person is using economic theories to study the
> Japanese, put the economic theories in the foreground. Explain
> what theoretical authors you are drawing on, what methods you are
> using, what big economic questions you're hoping to help answer,
> and so on, and then mention along the way that your case study
> happens to be drawn from the Mongolians.
>
> This strategy of foregrounding shared elements might seem weird
> at first; it might even seem manipulative or phony, as if there
> were one single authentic answer to the question "What are you
> working on?" and all the other answers are artificial. But that's
> not how it works. The answers that you construct for people from
> unfamiliar backgrounds will certainly feel unfamiliar. But if
> they are honest representations of your work then they are good,
> informative, relationship-building answers. Once you get some
> practice consciously constructing explanations of your work for
> many sorts of people, you will begin adjusting your explanations
> automatically, and the sense of weirdness and fakeness will
> dissipate.
I think I am ok at this now, but used to be pretty bad.
The approach above is a good way to make smalltalk in general:
start with a certain list of questions you can ask anyone (where
are you from, what do you do, do you travel, have you been to ___,
do you play sport ____); by the time you have been through those
questions you can probably find something you have in common to
talk about, and the rest comes naturally.
:
> SECTION 8. Academic Language
>
> A new graduate student, you face a whole series of institutional
> problems that are hard to explain to someone who hasn't already
> mastered the workings of the institution. One problem is endemic
> to human life in general, namely that you're always entering
> conversations in the middle. You show up someplace -- a new job,
> perhaps -- and the people there already have a conversation going
> on. They probably have quite a few running conversations, and
> they have probably accumulated a big network of shared background
> assumptions. Many words have probably acquired specialized local
> meanings whether the people are aware of it or not. Meanings will
> have been shaped by long-past events (what anthropologists call
> "critical incidents") and political fault-lines that nobody ever
> needs to mention. Even an innocent word choice can place you on
> one side of a conflict or another. These phenomena need not be
> spectacular or pathological, but they are certainly universal,
> and they can seriously confuse a newcomer.
For me this is one of the most difficult parts of merging various
communities of people I know: each community has its own set of
in-jokes and stuff that the others don't get. (and I love those
kinds of jokes, as most of you probably know)
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/