One of the bits of advice floating around for scientists is, "Don't apologize for your work". Usually this advice is dispensed within the context of giving a presentation - don't start a presentation with, "Sorry", don't apologize for unreadable graphs, etc.
But I think this advice should be extended to all professional scientific communication. If you hurt someone's feelings or spill their coffee, absolutely you should apologize. Of course you should speak considerately and professionally to all people. But when it comes to communicating science don't apologize for yourself. Don't degrade your expertise, don't qualify your statements.1
You can qualify presentations of information, for example, "This work is preliminary" or "This was just a first step to exploring this problem area." But that is very different from saying, "I realize I am only a masters student" or "Sorry, I am a n00b here" or "I know my undergraduate degree is in French literature, but..."
Be bold! Yes, you will probably need to wave the white flag sometimes. But don't start out with your flag waving. Start out strong.
1 Unless you work in a country where apologizing is the norm for professional communication, in which case, I'm sorry for this post. ;-)
YES! This is SO important. And, at least from what I have seen, women do this way more than men. BOLD FTW!
ReplyDeleteGreat advice! No one will believe in you if you don't yourself.
ReplyDelete"Yes, you will probably need to wave the white flag sometimes. But don't start out with your flag waving. Start out strong."
ReplyDeleteHuh? I'd far prefer to hear someone state reservations about their expertise up front, as opposed to resorting to this when challenged about their results. In fact, I don't think it's reasonable at all to resort to this in response to criticisms.
Also, if a speaker starts by saying they're only a n00b then I am all the more impressed by their accomplishments if they give a nice seminar.
So there is plenty of room for reasonable disagreement here.
@ Anon 12:51
ReplyDeleteI see where you're coming from, but that outlook assumes in a sense that you're above the other person in the science/academic hierarchy --and that they don't believe they should be considered your equal, even with regard to their own research.
If someone is -or should be- trying to establish themselves as a colleague and expert (and we should all at least position ourselves as experts on our *own* research), then aiming for a response like "...if a speaker starts by saying they're only a n00b then I am all the more impressed by their accomplishments if they give a nice seminar," is basically asking for condescension rather than respect.
I'm a big believer in identifying the limitations of one's work (lest others do it for you), but prefacing your work with a "limitations of *me*" statement strikes me as a bad idea in most cases.
--That said, if you're working on an interdisciplinary collaboration, and making suggestions outside the scope of your own expertise, it can be useful to point that out. Ideally, though, you should have established that you *have* an area of expertise first, and that you are (and think of yourself as being) a fully competent colleague within that domain. Then your comments as an informed non-expert in the other field will be taken far more seriously, even if they turn out to be somehow off-base or less than novel.