Who gives feedback?

Below I described the relative styles of my grad and postdoc labs during practice talk feedback sessions. When I get a chance to run the Dr. Jekyll lab, how do I want my own lab to work?

The grad lab approach is more democratic, more interactive, and more nurturing. Criticism is encouraged, but always phrased in diplomatic, constructive terms that demonstrate respect for the choices of the person giving the practice talk. It’s good training for the grad students and postdocs in the lab because they get to offer suggestions and hear how those suggestions are received by others--an opportunity to see which ideas fly and which don’t.

It’s also interminable. After the practice talk, there are a few comments, and then we usually would go through the slides one by one again, with constant commentary from every single person who felt moved to contribute. “What if you switched the graphs on the left and the right?” “You have a typo in the title!” “Looks as though you’re using different symbols for the data on this graph as opposed to the graph on the last slide.” “I think your color scheme here might not work for red-green colorblind men.” [actually this is a really important issue, I’m not trying to belittle it]. Then there’s discussion about wording, about structure, and so on. For a talk that’s supposed to run 30 min, the entire practice session could easily top 2 hours.

The postdoc lab style, on the other hand, is more top-down, and blessedly succinct. It was impressive, but a tiny bit scary, to watch my advisor gut a recent practice talk, tell the grad student exactly how he ought to phrase the whole introduction, offer directives (not suggestions) for improving the flow, and finish within 15 minutes. It was intense and effective. The grad student’s talk, which I later heard, improved a great deal (although he still had a typo that I could have told him about). Throughout the entire thing, the three other lab postdocs and I remained utterly silent. I am now living in some significant fear of how this advisor will react when I have to give a practice talk (thankfully no time soon). That’s probably a good thing, since it means I’ll think extra-carefully about my data before presenting it.

I don’t want the Dr. Jekyll lab (still several years distant, but I try to think about how to run it even now) to have interminable lab meetings. I also don’t want it to be a monologue in which I lay down the law, and everyone else is quiet. (actually sometimes I would probably like that a great deal, but at least in theory it’s bad). I’m pretty sure I will tilt towards interminable, because I am highly detail-oriented and quick to spot inconsistency, no matter how trivial. Graphical design is also important to me, and I have strong opinions on the Right Way to show data.

Huh. It’s sounding as though my future Jekyll lab meetings will be interminable monologues--the worst of both worlds. And here I thought this post would be about finding the happy medium!