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Pre-talking

By Jason D Lotay, on 17 November 2014

Great board work!We have instigated a new idea at the KCL/UCL Geometry Seminar – the “pre-talk”.

It’s well-known  that most people attending a seminar understand at most the first ten minutes and then not much after that.  To combat this and, primarily, to make the seminar more user-friendly for PhD students at the new LSGNT, we have added a half-hour at the beginning of the seminar so that the speaker, or a relevant member of the Geometry groups at KCL or UCL, can give a more introductory-level discussion.

Whilst the use of this half-hour is completely up to the speaker, it has been typically been used to give something of an overview or context for the main talk.  This initial experiment has proven to be rather successful, allowing the speaker to give more motivation and speak on a more general level before diving into the details of their own result.

With research becoming ever more specialised, and the number of research directions being pursued in London ever-increasing, it seems to me to have been beneficial not just to the PhD students, but also to the postdocs and faculty.

So it seems as if “pre-talking” is here to stay!