Tips for Seminar Participants

Many graduate students are initially reluctant to ask questions and actively participate in seminars, sometimes out of fear of looking like a fool in front of their peers and professors. Often they assume that any question or suggestion that they may have is so basic/stupid that it must be obvious to everyone but them. As a result, they become very passive participants in a seminar and get very little value from attending. This note provides some tips to help you become a polite, constructive, and critical seminar participant.

1. Read the paper before the seminar.

Reading a paper and attending the seminar are two different ways of absorbing information. Some aspects of understanding are much better done with pencil and paper at a desk, rather than live during a seminar. In any case, it is much easier to figure out what's going on during the talk and to choose the clarifying questions that will be most helpful to you if you've taken the time to read the paper. Identify what's new (at least to you) in the paper. Does it provide you with an introduction to a new literature, a new dataset, a new empirical result, or a new technique? Does it challenge something that you previously believed to be true? Do you find the paper convincing. If you read the paper in the critical fashion expected of a good referee, you will have a small number of questions and suggestions for improvement that are efficiently addressed in face-to-face discussion. While in 4060, you are expected to read each paper before the presentation. In your career you will find that you often won't have the time or the inclination to read a paper this carefully; at the very least, you should read the introduction and conclusion, skim over the bibliography to see where the paper fits into the literature, and maybe even try to get some of the notation down on paper before walking into the seminar. The better you are prepared when entering the seminar, the more right you have to interrupt the speaker and ask your questions or make your points.

2. Take notes during the seminar. Take a scratch pad with you and jot down some notes during the seminar. What does the presenter want you to get out of the paper? Write down a key equation or unfamiliar notation. As questions or suggestions come to you, write them down but often you should wait a bit before posing the question; sometimes the author addresses your point before moving on to a new section of the paper or you may get a sharper question by looking at it for a while before posing it.

3. When to keep quiet. Let the speaker have at least two to five minutes before your first interruption. Papers often begin with a list of related studies. While it is fair to ask the speaker to give you a brief summary of these papers if they are important to understanding today's talk, or to suggest other related studies if they are important, try not to get into a discussion about the literature review. The presenter wants to get feedback on new work and this is not the place to debate past contributions ("I can't understand how S.O.B.'s paper was published; it is clearly wrong as I show in my latest working paper"). Don't get into an argument about whether or not the literature has been adequately summarized unless

a) it's your paper that's being trashed, or

b) the presenter is using some incorrect interpretation of a specific paper as the motivation for today's talk.

Clarifying questions about notation, the entries in a table, or the interpretation of a graph are almost always fair. However, give the presenter a chance to describe these things before posing such questions. And don't get into a debate about notation ("Why did you use X rather than Y to denote income") or spelling ("Shouldn't that be Wiener rather Weiner?"). If you need further references in order to pick up a new literature or to study a technique introduced in the talk, then wait until after the seminar is over to ask the speaker (unless you are very confident that you aren't alone in having this need). Sometimes the seminar spins out of control. A barrage of questions has thrown the presenter off track and time is running out before the main contribution of the paper can be presented. Alternatively, it becomes clear that the paper is deeply flawed and we're all wasting our time being there. In such situations, keep quiet and allow the presenter to finish as quickly as possible.

4. When to speak up. In a typical seminar, there is time for about 15 questions/suggestions and about another dozen or so clarifying points. In 4060, you can expect to speak no more than 1 or 2 times per presentation. Make them count. If you have one or two important points then find the right time to interrupt, but get them out. Some of your questions may be posed by other students (it would be surprising if they weren't), but you may ask a follow-up question if you think your question is sharper. Constructive comments are almost always appropriate. But the best questions are the one that would be impossible or take too long to address by simply reading the paper and can best be handled face-to-face. Questions/suggestions that draw out the paper's contribution and make it easier to understand or clarify the contribution relative to existing studies are useful ("Why isn't this covered by Debreu's existence theorem?"). If you work in a subfield of economics that would take a very different approach to the same question and you don't understand the advantages and disadvantages of alternative modelling strategies, then ask (this is thin ice in field workshops but fair game in 4060). If you have thought about it and see no way that a claim in the paper can be right, then challenge the speaker. Often the source of the difficulty will be a misunderstanding about terminology, but sometimes the paper is wrong. (I've seen this happen to Bob Lucas).

If you are thinking about pursuing a new direction suggested by the paper and are curious whether it's been done or whether the author has thought about the direction but has decided that it wasn't worthwhile, then ask. If you have read the paper carefully and think that you are in a good position to make critical suggestions then you have every right to interrupt several times during the talk with your points. Deep conceptual questions about the methodology or about future directions for research are best left to the last ten minutes of the seminar, if time allows. Abraham Lincoln is credited with the saying "Sometimes it is better to keep quiet and have others suspect that you are a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". It's good advice, but the operative word is 'sometimes'. Use 4060 as an opportunity to learn where to draw the line on your questions and how to get the most out of attending a workshop.