Perceptions

My lab mate gave a departmental talk last week and while he spoke well, he was asked a lot of questions, some midway through before he finished. This weekend I was hanging out w/ a fellow student and he says something to the effect of, "HMMMM, your lab mate was really given a hard time..." He meant the profs had many questions and suggestions which did not make our lab/ study look good, I guess. But, the thing is almost all of the suggestions were hog wash! I mean they had theorhetical merit but most have already been tried and did not work for practical reasons. Or trying them would be such a risk that it would not be worth it. (If it didn't work it would lead to months of no data collection, and if it did work it would only marginally improve our data) So not really worth the risk. Also, some of the suggestions, again sounded good in theory, but would not work w/ the modality we are testing. Also, some suggestions were made my older profs in a condescending way, insulting our experimental design. While our design is not ideal, no design is perfect. Secondly, if he had been listening he would have known that parts of the task were not ambiguous (which one of the things he was asking about). Which made me think, how did other faculty perceive this talk? Did they have the same thoughts as my friend?

I left thinking wow, our faculty are out of touch w/ our area. They haven't encountered much about this particular topic! [because when we go to our smaller conference we get such better discussion and the issues they revisited don't come up- people already KNOW it has been tried... etc.]

But obviously the faculty asking the questions did not know these things.... so where does that leave us? I guess we need to be more vocal about our work. Also it served to open my eyes. While the faculty know the behavioral set up they are not aquainted w/ the special issues we have due to the modality we use and the animals we have. I know I should address these issues up front, (if/ when I speak here) hopefully that will lead to better questions/suggestions that can actually be of use to us!

As a sidenote E had heard our friend and jumped into explain why some of the comments/suggestions were not valid in this scenario. That made me happy, not only did he listen to me, but he knew enough about what I do experimentally to defend it! How about that for a future spouse!