Job Talk and BBG Walk

Job Talk#

I worked on my job talk all day.

Every day it’s freshly crazy how long it takes to make slides. I think I make roughly 7 slides in 1.5 hours. I think the slowness comes from:

• Crafting the story. You’re kind of mentally running through the logical flow of the presentation, thinking: What can I say that’s well-founded, supported by my own work, not too controversial, not too far out of what I know about, relevant in the current time and to the current audience, flows coherently with what came before, and sets up what comes next?

• Editing graphics. Thankfully, many graphics from papers and talks are scalable (SVG or PDF). But there’s inevitably some hand-editing that happens for almost every figure, either to reorient it (portrait → landscape) so it fits better on a slide, to remove elements so they can be built them in, to remove distracting background colors, to get rid of artifacts, or all of the above.

• Arrangement. I feel pretty quick about this—just keeping things fairly minimal. (Sometimes the text can get overwhelming, but that’s not always possible to avoid when you’re studying natural language processing.) But it still takes time.

The most challenging part is that I can’t use almost any slides from past talks, which would have saved an enormous amount of time. Visually and tonally, they are absolutely all over the place. Also, they assume levels of depth that don’t match what I’m giving in my job talk (usually too much). Editing an old slide is about as fast as just making a new one.

It is quite the slog, but I’m glad to have an imminent deadline to power through.

BBG#

I realized yesterday I’ve kept the daily blog work-focused. I think that’s good. Only because today was so one-note will I attach a couple of crappy phone photos of the gorgeous autumn day in the hour-long Brooklyn Botanic Garden walk I gave myself today as a break.⁰¹