What am I supposed to ask to the guest speaker?

[bialetti-overdose]

Hi all,

 

In my school, we invite guest speakers for a seminar presentation each week. This week, my advisor advised me to have a lunch with the guest speaker. The lunch usually lasts an hour. But the question is...

What the hack am I supposed to talk about with the guest speaker?

 

Any tips? Should I read up the speaker's research before hand to pretend that I know about the person's previous work?

[Cheshire_Cat]

Professors are people too.  I would suggest reading up on his research some, however when in doubt, you can also talk about family, work, hobbies, ect.

[TakeruK]

In my department, we usually focus on non-research topics when having lunch with the speaker. This is because we are a fairly multi-disciplinary department so talking about one specific research problem might be very interesting to 2 people at the table but does not do a good job of including the other 4 people there. So our lunch meetings generally cover topics like living in your city, what it's like to live in the speaker's city, a recent conference, an upcoming conference, hobbies, weather, general discussion about exciting things in the field (as long as everyone can participate/contribute), etc. Be prepared to talk about yourself and your research interest in 30-60 seconds. 

 

So I would say that lunch meetings are mostly to get to know each other as people. It's really useful because the prof will meet a ton of other people during their visit and lunch is usually the longest meeting time and also because it's personal information, it tends to stick better. So it's a good way to get to meet people in your field and hopefully some of them will remember you later on (at conferences etc.). The in-depth research talks should be saved for the one-on-one meetings!

 

An exception of course, is if the entire lunch group is all working on the same problem!

[fuzzylogician]

People like to talk about themselves. This goes for both professional and non-invasive personal questions. You could ask about their educational path (where did you go to school? did you like it there?), their current position (so you're at the U of X now; how do you like it there? how's the city?), their current research (what are you working on now?), what they like to do for fun, whether they like to travel and where to, if they have advice for students who are just starting out, or if they are older, for perspectives on the field and how it's grown.