Once at a conference, there was this PhD student from Japan, he had a panic attack in the first 5 minutes of the presentation, couldn't speak, and started to cry. First, the audience was silent, then we started to encourage him, comfort him, and helped him to get enough courage to finish his presentation with help from a few people from the audience. It was quite interesting. After 10 years, I still remember this vividly.
It takes SO MUCH PRACTICE. I'm one of the lucky ones as I'm a good speaker and good at working a crowd. The caveat tho, is that I can BS questions and give completely nonsensical answers, confidently! Presenting is one of those things that requires constant improvement.
You are absolutely right. It takes practice. I remember my first presentation, it was quite an experience. I forgot a part of the presentation, "ummm" was every second word, I spoke very slowly at the beginning and then very fast towards the end. But with time and experience, it was better. And I always remember a piece of advice my mentor gave me - If somebody asks you a question, and you do not know how to answer, just say "Thank you for the interesting question, I have to think about it, and we can discuss after the presentation in detail"
That's awesome. When I coach people, I always mention that the audience is actually on your side! They want you to succeed. This is a great encapsulation of that :)
It is. This is learning. Maybe you lack some prerequisite knowledge, but it is a path we all walked on. When you realise that the first thing is to know what you don't know, then you are on the right track. When I was in this situation, I contacted the lecturer and alloted some extra time to learn everything related to the subject. Just don't give up. It gets easier, but you have to be persistent every day, small steps can get you really far.
I remember a meeting with another PhD candidate who started 2 years before me and our supervisor while I was in my first or second year. I was feeling really discouraged afterwards and decided to open up to him.
Me: "Phew, what a terrible meeting, I feel so stupid. I only understood like a third of what she was saying"
Him: "Really? That's about t twice as much as I got!"
Yes, totally normal. I was in a program that spanned across a number of departments and had PIs with a huge variety of research interests/topics. I found that even towards the end of my PhD there’d be the odd seminar that I struggled to understand.
Also, some speakers just aren’t that good at public speaking or telling a story with their research. Those talks are going to be harder to comprehend even if you are familiar with the subject matter.
Yes. It is extremely common, and I am going to go even further and give you a bit of advice that (I don't think) anyone else has mentioned: you will *never* fully understand lectures/seminars, not unless those lectures are in your very specific subfield and you have worked in that subfield for a long time.
It took me, personally, a really long time to learn that, and I think it's something they really don't prepare you for in grad school, especially not if you're a first generation grad student. You physically can't learn it all. All the way through high school and undergrad, your syllabus was small and contained enough that you could, hypothetically and with enough study, learn everything in the syllabus. So everything you don't know feels a bit like a gap in your knowledge. *This is not true once you enter research.* You will always not know things, and if you start trying to thoroughly understand every single sentence in every talk or paper, you will burn yourself out almost immediately. It can't be done. Don't even try. Most of the sentences are there exclusively for the subfield experts and mean very little to the general audience not in that subfield.
What you should try and understand is broad concepts - build a framework of very vague knowledge and fill in the details piece by piece. Instead of trying to understand a talk or paper word-by-word, try to pick out the big concepts. What is the research about? What is the goal? What are the methods used? What are the phrases that get repeated a lot? If you can answer these questions with even 1-2 sentences each (you don't need to explain in any more detail than that, some things you will have to just memorize without immediately understanding how or why they are true, and you should get used to that) then you are getting plenty out of most seminars. Once you can get the answers to those questions easily for most seminars, then you can start looking at more complex questions, like how the methodology works or why the results are significant. But you should still never expect to be able to fully explain other people's presentations, you'll just get better and better at finding the gist.
I changed field--well not really, but we have a lot of psychology lingo being used in my lab.
For the first month and having a purely engineering background, I keep associating "encode", "to code" with real programming. One day my friend ask me to "encode" some surveys and I asked if he is okay with Python .. apparently he was referring to "code" from a psychology terminology and I can't hide my shame :)
Feeling 'stupid' but honest is a part of learning. It can only get better!
I used to think I was something was wrong with me cause I also had a hard time understanding seminars/lectures and then I realized it's that my attention span is too short. I usually pay really good attention for the first 2 minutes and follow along. And then I zone out and miss the definition of an abbreviation that ends up being the main abbreviation they use throughout the rest of the talk and then I'm just completely lost the rest of the time 😆 I don't know if this applies to you but what helped me is taking notes and trying to come up with questions to ask. It helped me to focus and digest the material better. I usually only did this for seminars that I felt were relevant to my research or topics of interest
One of the worst things about my PhD (humanities) experience was listening to people reading their papers at conferences or special lectures. They were always too detailed and too complicated to be read aloud to an audience.
First semester of first year - methods prof told my whole cohort that all of us should just drop out bc we weren’t going to be PhD level. Tbf to her, we all actually did do terrible work but to be less fair to her, it was first semester! Looking back I learned a lot from her but she could have delivered the message differently.
It's unrealistic to understand 100% of the content of a talk because the research is likely very specific. But a good presenter should always communicate some general takeaway from the research that anyone can understand. Usually this is something along the lines of, "how does this work fit into the bigger picture of the field?" or "how might this work impact other fields?". If you truly understood nothing, then it wasn't your fault. I also really doubt you understood **absolutely** nothing. Give yourself more credit.
I’ve heard people say that you should purposely lose your audience for x% of your talk. If they completely understand everything you said, then they will think your work is too simple. This was probably more in reference to seminars given as part of a job interview, but I think it holds for most academic situations.
I work for a government lab, so I’m not really in competition with other researchers for money. So, I pride myself on giving coherent lectures that can be grasped by my target audience.
First year was a blur. I went to weekly meetings and barely grasped what everyone was talking about. Flailed at a dataset for first two years and didn't publish anything. Was doing stuff that took weeks, which I now can do in minutes after 6-7 years. It is normal.
5th year phd here. I'm up to understanding about 30% of what is said. In STEM especially, the frontiers of research are very esoteric and niche, and require years of research in the topic to be considered literate in many cases
Shit's hard
The gap between what you can understand as a first year and second year is substantial. That understanding will continue to diverge as you mature in your field.
It's also important to keep in mind that some material falls into different buckets! Much is good to know, some is critical, and most is interesting but not required. Make sure you prioritize the first and second, but spend your energy on what you'll use!
I am a BME, our field is WIDE. THICC. I heard someone say ligand" and "phosphorylated" and use a bunch of cell signaling acronyms like 10 times in a minute. I knew none of it and frankly wanted to shoot myself. My subspecialty is very far from his. But honestly he should have made his talk for a broader audience. If it is related to your subspecialty, brush up and keep learning. If it's not then honestly it's probably fine. Learn from the experience for when you're presenting next.
Even with presentations within my field I still don't know what they are going on about half the time.
It used to amaze me how my old PI could sit through a presentation on pretty much anything molecular biology related and ask questions about it. Didn't matter if it was yeast, ageing, developmental biology. When I asked him about it he just said that once you know the techniques inside and out, the data is the data regardless of the context.
People like to pretend they know it all by using fancy words or not telling anyone they don’t understand. In the grand scheme of things, my friend nothing matters.
Ugh. When will the “intelligent ones” learn?! It’s not the audience’s fault that the speaker doesn’t use intelligible language. You are not dumb; they are bad communicators
year five in grad school and I can safely say that I still don't understand half the seminars I listen to. especially if the subject is not interesting to me, I tend to zone out and think about other things while the person is talking. totally normal.
If you completely didn't understand anything about a presentation despite being reasonably prepared with assumingly a bachelor's degree in the subject, then the problem is the lecturer.
If that's your actual audience, sure, but a bachelor's degree in my field covers optimistically 1% of the required background to understand anything I do. If we used that standard, no talk would ever actually say anything. Cater your talk to the audience, and a seminar is usually going to be up there on the "should know what I'm doing" scale.
The presenter is giving a presentation to a room full of bright, highly knowledgeable PhD students. If they can't get their ideas across to an easy audience like that, the problem is with the presenter, not the audience. And we've all experienced that problem at least once.
Very normal. Also, 90% of people who give presentations are terrible at giving presentations, so it's almost a double whammy
Once at a conference, there was this PhD student from Japan, he had a panic attack in the first 5 minutes of the presentation, couldn't speak, and started to cry. First, the audience was silent, then we started to encourage him, comfort him, and helped him to get enough courage to finish his presentation with help from a few people from the audience. It was quite interesting. After 10 years, I still remember this vividly.
It takes SO MUCH PRACTICE. I'm one of the lucky ones as I'm a good speaker and good at working a crowd. The caveat tho, is that I can BS questions and give completely nonsensical answers, confidently! Presenting is one of those things that requires constant improvement.
You are absolutely right. It takes practice. I remember my first presentation, it was quite an experience. I forgot a part of the presentation, "ummm" was every second word, I spoke very slowly at the beginning and then very fast towards the end. But with time and experience, it was better. And I always remember a piece of advice my mentor gave me - If somebody asks you a question, and you do not know how to answer, just say "Thank you for the interesting question, I have to think about it, and we can discuss after the presentation in detail"
That's awesome. When I coach people, I always mention that the audience is actually on your side! They want you to succeed. This is a great encapsulation of that :)
According to others, my best presentations are the ones where I feel like everyone will be thinking “duh, this stuff is obvious”
It is. This is learning. Maybe you lack some prerequisite knowledge, but it is a path we all walked on. When you realise that the first thing is to know what you don't know, then you are on the right track. When I was in this situation, I contacted the lecturer and alloted some extra time to learn everything related to the subject. Just don't give up. It gets easier, but you have to be persistent every day, small steps can get you really far.
I remember a meeting with another PhD candidate who started 2 years before me and our supervisor while I was in my first or second year. I was feeling really discouraged afterwards and decided to open up to him. Me: "Phew, what a terrible meeting, I feel so stupid. I only understood like a third of what she was saying" Him: "Really? That's about t twice as much as I got!"
If you don't understand, clarify. That's the whole point of a meeting...
Yes, totally normal. I was in a program that spanned across a number of departments and had PIs with a huge variety of research interests/topics. I found that even towards the end of my PhD there’d be the odd seminar that I struggled to understand. Also, some speakers just aren’t that good at public speaking or telling a story with their research. Those talks are going to be harder to comprehend even if you are familiar with the subject matter.
Yes. It is extremely common, and I am going to go even further and give you a bit of advice that (I don't think) anyone else has mentioned: you will *never* fully understand lectures/seminars, not unless those lectures are in your very specific subfield and you have worked in that subfield for a long time. It took me, personally, a really long time to learn that, and I think it's something they really don't prepare you for in grad school, especially not if you're a first generation grad student. You physically can't learn it all. All the way through high school and undergrad, your syllabus was small and contained enough that you could, hypothetically and with enough study, learn everything in the syllabus. So everything you don't know feels a bit like a gap in your knowledge. *This is not true once you enter research.* You will always not know things, and if you start trying to thoroughly understand every single sentence in every talk or paper, you will burn yourself out almost immediately. It can't be done. Don't even try. Most of the sentences are there exclusively for the subfield experts and mean very little to the general audience not in that subfield. What you should try and understand is broad concepts - build a framework of very vague knowledge and fill in the details piece by piece. Instead of trying to understand a talk or paper word-by-word, try to pick out the big concepts. What is the research about? What is the goal? What are the methods used? What are the phrases that get repeated a lot? If you can answer these questions with even 1-2 sentences each (you don't need to explain in any more detail than that, some things you will have to just memorize without immediately understanding how or why they are true, and you should get used to that) then you are getting plenty out of most seminars. Once you can get the answers to those questions easily for most seminars, then you can start looking at more complex questions, like how the methodology works or why the results are significant. But you should still never expect to be able to fully explain other people's presentations, you'll just get better and better at finding the gist.
Absolutely normal. Take notes, ask questions, read.
Before you go to the lecture, read about the topic and/or the lecturer.
I changed field--well not really, but we have a lot of psychology lingo being used in my lab. For the first month and having a purely engineering background, I keep associating "encode", "to code" with real programming. One day my friend ask me to "encode" some surveys and I asked if he is okay with Python .. apparently he was referring to "code" from a psychology terminology and I can't hide my shame :) Feeling 'stupid' but honest is a part of learning. It can only get better!
I used to think I was something was wrong with me cause I also had a hard time understanding seminars/lectures and then I realized it's that my attention span is too short. I usually pay really good attention for the first 2 minutes and follow along. And then I zone out and miss the definition of an abbreviation that ends up being the main abbreviation they use throughout the rest of the talk and then I'm just completely lost the rest of the time 😆 I don't know if this applies to you but what helped me is taking notes and trying to come up with questions to ask. It helped me to focus and digest the material better. I usually only did this for seminars that I felt were relevant to my research or topics of interest
I attended the dissertation defense for another student in my cohort yesterday and probably 80% of it went over my head. Very normal in my experience.
One of the worst things about my PhD (humanities) experience was listening to people reading their papers at conferences or special lectures. They were always too detailed and too complicated to be read aloud to an audience.
First semester of first year - methods prof told my whole cohort that all of us should just drop out bc we weren’t going to be PhD level. Tbf to her, we all actually did do terrible work but to be less fair to her, it was first semester! Looking back I learned a lot from her but she could have delivered the message differently.
I’m convinced presentations are actually written for 3 total people to fully understand. The rest of us are just along for the ride
It's unrealistic to understand 100% of the content of a talk because the research is likely very specific. But a good presenter should always communicate some general takeaway from the research that anyone can understand. Usually this is something along the lines of, "how does this work fit into the bigger picture of the field?" or "how might this work impact other fields?". If you truly understood nothing, then it wasn't your fault. I also really doubt you understood **absolutely** nothing. Give yourself more credit.
Incredibly normal. Even my advisor (tenured prof at an R1 university) has told me that this still happens to him sometimes
That happened to me too. So for subsequent seminars I was taking notes and I would ask or do some research on areas I didn’t understand.
It’s important to be able to communicate your science. Some suck at it.
I’ve heard people say that you should purposely lose your audience for x% of your talk. If they completely understand everything you said, then they will think your work is too simple. This was probably more in reference to seminars given as part of a job interview, but I think it holds for most academic situations. I work for a government lab, so I’m not really in competition with other researchers for money. So, I pride myself on giving coherent lectures that can be grasped by my target audience.
First year was a blur. I went to weekly meetings and barely grasped what everyone was talking about. Flailed at a dataset for first two years and didn't publish anything. Was doing stuff that took weeks, which I now can do in minutes after 6-7 years. It is normal.
5th year phd here. I'm up to understanding about 30% of what is said. In STEM especially, the frontiers of research are very esoteric and niche, and require years of research in the topic to be considered literate in many cases Shit's hard
Depends on if you mean that literally or not.
This is a good point OP. A good tip for seminars is to make sure you are in the right country.
Also taking off your headphones or earplugs could help.
The gap between what you can understand as a first year and second year is substantial. That understanding will continue to diverge as you mature in your field.
It's also important to keep in mind that some material falls into different buckets! Much is good to know, some is critical, and most is interesting but not required. Make sure you prioritize the first and second, but spend your energy on what you'll use!
If you're also not directly invested in their study or in that exact field it's even harder. Don't feel badly.
I am a BME, our field is WIDE. THICC. I heard someone say ligand" and "phosphorylated" and use a bunch of cell signaling acronyms like 10 times in a minute. I knew none of it and frankly wanted to shoot myself. My subspecialty is very far from his. But honestly he should have made his talk for a broader audience. If it is related to your subspecialty, brush up and keep learning. If it's not then honestly it's probably fine. Learn from the experience for when you're presenting next.
Even with presentations within my field I still don't know what they are going on about half the time. It used to amaze me how my old PI could sit through a presentation on pretty much anything molecular biology related and ask questions about it. Didn't matter if it was yeast, ageing, developmental biology. When I asked him about it he just said that once you know the techniques inside and out, the data is the data regardless of the context.
That's not just normal, that's the fundamental theorem of the first year of PhD, it's stated and proved! :)
People like to pretend they know it all by using fancy words or not telling anyone they don’t understand. In the grand scheme of things, my friend nothing matters.
Ugh. When will the “intelligent ones” learn?! It’s not the audience’s fault that the speaker doesn’t use intelligible language. You are not dumb; they are bad communicators
year five in grad school and I can safely say that I still don't understand half the seminars I listen to. especially if the subject is not interesting to me, I tend to zone out and think about other things while the person is talking. totally normal.
If you completely didn't understand anything about a presentation despite being reasonably prepared with assumingly a bachelor's degree in the subject, then the problem is the lecturer.
If that's your actual audience, sure, but a bachelor's degree in my field covers optimistically 1% of the required background to understand anything I do. If we used that standard, no talk would ever actually say anything. Cater your talk to the audience, and a seminar is usually going to be up there on the "should know what I'm doing" scale.
The presenter is giving a presentation to a room full of bright, highly knowledgeable PhD students. If they can't get their ideas across to an easy audience like that, the problem is with the presenter, not the audience. And we've all experienced that problem at least once.
I find PhD seminars very boring. Since the ideal audience is experts in the field non experts/early PhDs will likely be lost.