How do you make a research seminar rock?

[day_manderly]

So I am organizing a research seminar in our research center, and we are looking at different options. How to make it truly engaging? Truly special and interesting? What would you suggest? (I mean, besides free beer )

We are thinking about breaking it into two parts: 1. discussing relevant issues in our field; 2. discussing the problems one of the participants has come across in their work.

But, how to make it truly... hot?

[St Andrews Lynx]

You can't force "hotness"!

Think about what the goals of the seminar is. Who is the target audience (presumably non-experts in the field, but how much would they already know)? It might be better to err on the side of less material rather than rushing through a lot of different talking points. 

 

[fuzzylogician]

There is no set formula for generating "hotness". What will work will depend on the circumstances -- your participants, your goals, your physical settings (room, time of day, etc). Different formats will work for different people and different goals, so it might help to know more about who you are aiming for and how many people you expect to get. A good format for a group of 10-15 specialists is very different than what would work for 50 non-specialists. So, give us more information, and we might be able to give you better advice. But .. free food. That always helps. 

[day_manderly]

6 hours ago, fuzzylogician said:

There is no set formula for generating "hotness". What will work will depend on the circumstances -- your participants, your goals, your physical settings (room, time of day, etc). Different formats will work for different people and different goals, so it might help to know more about who you are aiming for and how many people you expect to get. A good format for a group of 10-15 specialists is very different than what would work for 50 non-specialists. So, give us more information, and we might be able to give you better advice. But .. free food. That always helps. 

Sure. So, more information:

1. We are talking a 'soft' field. New information can easily be digested by all the participants.

2. 10-15 participants, mostly specialists + few people familiar with the umbrella problematics of the seminar.

3. Goals - to determine how to make research more applicable and its representation more interesting for the public. So, maximizing impact, basically.

4. Physical setting - daytime, great facilities, no food options.

[TakeruK]

Is this an optional seminar that people can choose to attend or not, or are people required to attend in some way (e.g. course requirement or some other requirement)?

Are people motivated to attend for their own reasons? Or do you have to run this so that people without anything invested in the seminar would still want to attend?

I think these points make a difference because it determines how much work you can expect participants to put into the seminar outside of the seminar hours and how much external motivators you need to supply!

As for food, are you just saying there are no food options in the building? Or that food is not allowed? Or that there is no budget for food? If budget is a problem, you could consider something inexpensive, like tea and cookies (bring a kettle, buy some tea bags, and get a box/tray of cookies each week or how every often each week). To pay for it, you can ask the participants to contribute (if this is something they want) or perhaps you can get a faculty member (or several faculty members) in the department to "sponsor" it. You can probably do it all for roughly 100-150 dollars per semester. Or, if you just do it once for the first meeting (making it clear it's a one-time thing).

[day_manderly]

3 hours ago, TakeruK said:

Is this an optional seminar that people can choose to attend or not, or are people required to attend in some way (e.g. course requirement or some other requirement)?

Are people motivated to attend for their own reasons? Or do you have to run this so that people without anything invested in the seminar would still want to attend?

I think these points make a difference because it determines how much work you can expect participants to put into the seminar outside of the seminar hours and how much external motivators you need to supply!

As for food, are you just saying there are no food options in the building? Or that food is not allowed? Or that there is no budget for food? If budget is a problem, you could consider something inexpensive, like tea and cookies (bring a kettle, buy some tea bags, and get a box/tray of cookies each week or how every often each week). To pay for it, you can ask the participants to contribute (if this is something they want) or perhaps you can get a faculty member (or several faculty members) in the department to "sponsor" it. You can probably do it all for roughly 100-150 dollars per semester. Or, if you just do it once for the first meeting (making it clear it's a one-time thing).

Optional.

People are motivated, mostly, because they are interested in the topics. But they do not take anything out of it for themselves (though they can if they want).

Food is simply never consumed at the seminars in our organizations (they usually don't last long). People come with their own coffee, etc., and everybody is happy with it. It is a separate applied research center, not a university.

[fuzzylogician]

Alright, so for a smaller specialist audience, one thing you might consider is rotating presentations by group members (when there is something to present, and you should know that people will often not volunteer but will agree to present if you ask them, so as the organizer this will be an ongoing task for you), presentations by invited speakers if you happen to get someone passing through town, and otherwise you might pick a topic and either read papers on that topic, or in one group I'm in we choose a book we want to read per semester and go through the chapters 1-2 at a time any week that we don't have a presentation. 

Also, cookies. It's inexpensive and it'll go well with coffee. If you bring a box and pass it around once or twice during the talk, I'm sure people will take some. 

When you have your organizational meeting, you want to explain the goals of the group -- likely to provide a venue for people to stay in touch with developments in their field, and a low-stress option for presenting new and ongoing work. Discuss a theme, ask for volunteer presenters, but to set the tone, you might want to get a few of your colleagues to give presentations like you'd want the group to have (and maybe you give one), so people see what you are envisioning. Also, so they have time to start thinking about what they'd like to present. Another option is to meet every other week, so it's easier to find presenters and it's not as time consuming. 

[TakeruK]

Ah okay, as a grad student, I've also co-organized (with another grad student in my year) something pretty similar to your set-up then. As fuzzylogician says, the hardest part was getting people to sign up to present papers and having an open sign-up doesn't work very well at all, even when people are motivated to do so. I found it most effective when I went door-to-door (office-to-office) and asked people if they would want to present. Sometimes, if there is a paper in their area of expertise, asking them specifically if they would like to present on paper X because of their knowledge works really well. You have to strike the right balance of "nagging" (so that they do it) without being overbearing or making someone feel like they need to present something they don't feel comfortable doing and then hating the seminar or dropping out from it.

In "our" seminar, the goal was to stay up to date on the latest interesting papers from our field in general (i.e. to learn about new developments outside of your own sub-field). In the first year, we had informal presentations with slides etc. The papers were sent out ahead of time and people were supposed to read them so that we would have in-depth discussions. This rarely worked out because people didn't read the papers and it was too much work to be the presenter so very few people did it. We did manage to fill an entire year of this but it was like pulling teeth to get people to present and people lost interest and attendance dropped. To be honest, by the last semester, it felt like everyone who still attended did so out of obligation/felt like a chore instead of something people wanted to do.

In the second year, we tried an even more informal approach (there's like 6 other seminars in our department so we wanted it to be not like a normal seminar). So, instead, the rule was no presentations, no slides. Just bring in a printout of the most important figure of the paper and be prepared to talk about what the authors did, and why it's significant in 15-20 minutes. We also opened it up beyond just papers. Following something from my undergrad school, we also just brought in press releases or science news stories (e.g. from New Scientist, Scientific American, etc.) about recent work. We also expanded it quite a bit beyond our field of planetary science and used a very broad definition. So, we talked about things from what's going on inside the cores of stars to how planets form to detecting water on Mars to psychological effects on humans isolated in a 6 month journey to Mars to how a specific type of fish adapted to the changing salt levels in Death Valley. Sometimes people did talk about a particular problem they had on their mind.

The new method had pros and cons. It was a lot less work for everyone: no reading of materials ahead of time and basically you just keep an eye out for interesting stories each week and share them with colleagues. We described it as "water cooler talk" for science related to our field. This filled a need where our very inter disciplinary department would all be doing very cool stuff within our subfields and although we hang out a lot socially, we had very little spaces to hang out and talk about science that isn't our own work. The downside of this format was that no one was truly an expert on the stuff they were presenting on and if the expert was in the room, we would have some good insights, but otherwise, it was a bunch of non-experts talking about these science stories. Our goal was that this seminar was supposed to "spark" interest in a topic and more in-depth discussions can happen at another time. This met the needs of many participants but not as much for others sometimes. It's hard to have a single format that works for everyone though. That said, I am really proud of one concrete outcome: one faculty member just randomly brought up a problem in modelling some specific type of material on one of the moons of Saturn and another student, who normally would not work with this professor or think about this topic, had an insight from their own work on a different subfield. Combined with another student's skillset, the three of them went on to write a new paper that solved the problem! So I thought that was pretty cool

Anyways, just sharing two experiences in case the information helps you decide what you want to do. Even though there's no norm for food, maybe that will be the cool unique thing that makes your seminar stand out from the other stuff happening at your institute.