Charles Martineau

Yes­ter­day my friend urged me to read How to Build an Eco­nomic Model in Your Spare Time by Hal R. Var­ian — econ. prof at Berke­ley. Soooo refresh­ing! To make this short, its another amaz­ing guide on help­ing econ­o­mist and any researchers on how to gen­er­ate great research ideas and pro­duce great work. But there is some­thing that I read in there that you will not usu­ally hear in academia:

There are three parts to a sem­i­nar: the intro­duc­tion, the con­tent, and the conclusion. My advice about intro­duc­tions is sim­ple: don’t have one. I have seen many sem­i­nars ruined by long, pre­ten­tious, con­tent­less intro­duc­tions. My advise: say a few sen­tences about the big pic­ture and then get down to busi­ness: show them what you’ve got and why it’s impor­tant. The pri­mary rea­son to get down to busi­ness right away is that your audi­ence will only remem­ber about twenty min­utes of your talk and that is usu­ally the first twenty min­utes. So make sure that you get some use­ful infor­ma­tion into that first twenty minutes.

Amen.

Most of the sem­i­nars I attend its always the same god damn thing… if the pre­sen­ter takes too much time before jump­ing in the meat of his or her research, peo­ple start to ask a lot of ques­tions and the audi­ence lose track right away and won­ders why there is some­one if front of them… I usu­ally start dreaming : )