Learnings from seminars

These are a collection of notes that I have made while attending seminars in which academics present their research for judgement by their senior colleagues. These included “Proposal seminars”, “Pre-thesis seminars” and “Faculty recruitment seminars”. The passage below is written from the notes I took during these seminars and are thus completely subject to my subjective interpretations of the dynamics that I felt developing during these seminars.

First explain why there is a gap?

Define your terms very carefully and completely

Give specific examples to support your conclusions

Study reverse situations as well

• Success due to presence of A -> Does absence of A imply failure? Give examples.

Justification of inferences, particularly for qualitative research

Encourage questions, allow questions to complete, understand the questions and then answer

Answer the following questions in your presentation

• What is important?
• What is new?
• What is non-obvious?

Pure qualitative research needs very very solid theoretical backing

Always use external data to validate your inferences from case studies

Try to get access to documents if you do qualitative research and interviews

You need to be like a historian

You need to be a good story teller