Public speaking is part of a scientist's life, presentations at conferences, impromptu introductions for other people's talks, lectures to students. Recently, I met a PhD student who delayed grad school for years because she was terrified of speaking to groups of people. I could relate. I was a complete ham in grade school, once standing in front of the school with a photograph of the chipmunk in the back yard, the subject of my speech, buttoned onto my sweater. By high school, nerves and shyness had taken hold, and when I made a presentation to my grade eleven class, my knees were literally knocking together. It was years before I could give a talk without severe gastrointestinal distress or the loss of a night's sleep.
Fortunately, it is part of our training. In the last couple of years of university, there are a few seminar courses in which students teach the subject matter to each other and the professor merely hands out the grades. We are taught various tricks:
- If you are afraid to make eye contact with the audience, look over the heads of the people in the back row.
- Effective talks follow this structure: tell the audience three things you are going to say, say those three things, and then repeat the three things you have just said.
- Always check your fly before going to the podium.
My first seminar course introduced me to a recurring risk for any public speaker, the snoozing audience member, in this case the professor. My topic was industrial microbiology; I couldn't blame the prof for nodding off. Another local colleague was famous for sitting as close to the speaker as he could manage because he was hard of hearing, then snoring loudly when the lights went down. People don't just fall asleep in my presence when I am at the podium. At my first international congress, one of the most famous Japanese scientists in the field dozed off using my shoulder for a pillow.
Hecklers aren't normally an occupational hazard in science. Wolves sometimes emerge during the question period at conferences, but most questions are polite. After my first conference talk, though, I was savagely attacked by an older colleague who was offended that I had inexplicably overlooked a paragraph on terminology in a 400 page book he had published six years earlier. Fortunately, I was so relieved that the talk was over that I didn't notice his aggression until listening to the recording a week later.
An engaged audience makes for a good seminar. One of my colleagues loves to sit in the front row, right in front of the speaker. He nods and smiles and smacks his thighs and makes twinkling eye contact and he is just so into it that the speaker always feels like the most charismatic, witty and brilliant of intellects. He is like those people that comedians hire to prime the laughter in the crowd. If only there were more like him.
