Tip 3: Brownbags
I expect my students to attend at least one brown bag seminar each week. These are lunch time colloquia that feature a mix of internal and external speakers. I suggest that you attend a sampling of seminars this semester—ITP for sure, but also think of CDE . There are others—IRP, race/ethnicity, SPAM, fem sem, etc. Today I want to talk about why this is important from the first year on.
1) Science is at its heart about a COMMUNITY of scholars sharing an understanding of the right questions to ask and the right ways to go about answering them. Like the rest of social life, it is structured by norms and beliefs, fashions, fads and history. Scientific communities are broad and extend across the campus, nation and world. YOUR life as a member of this community begins here, in the department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. This is where you tap in to that huge network of understandings, ideas, methods and people. The brown bag is one of the primary venues where this occurs.
Everything else I have to say follows from this.
2) The brown bag is a wonderful place to gain exposure to current research in the fields in which you are or may be interested. In part because we are a great university we have great internal speakers and bring in great external speakers.
3) No, you won't get everything that people say. There will be days when you feel lost and wonder if the language of discourse is really English or some academic dialect that includes a smattering of English prepositions and articles just to give the illusion of familiarity. But some of even the most dense presentations will come back to you in the future, some of the questions you raise in your own mind or with your peers will set you down a productive path and some of the questions members of the audience ask (and speakers’ answers to those questions) will shed light on the topic.
4) People in the brown bag model academic behaviors. Take note. Feel free to ask me or others what we think of presentations, questions and answers. [I will tell you now that lots of people's slides suck and if you ever sheepishly say 'you probably can't read these numbers' during your own talk while showing a power point slide in 12 point font I will throw fruit at you.] The quality of the exchanges here is about as good as it gets in my experience. In fact, the hardest job talk I ever gave was my practice job talk in the demography seminar about 11 years ago.
And that was incredibly helpful, in part because this community is seriously engaged in improving one another's work and learning from one another. I have never seen anyone on this faculty take someone down for sport; people are critical, but for all the right reasons and with genuinely good intentions. On the other hand, some of my closest friends think I am naive. I'll let you judge, silently of course. ;)
5) Faculty notice your presence. This admittedly matters more to some faculty than to others. For better or for worse, it matters to me. To be honest, it annoys me when faculty do not show up. See (1) above.
Having said all of this, there is nothing wrong with being an occasional visitor to some brown bags and a regular in others. I would like you to attend the demography seminar and ITP this semester when you can (Ellen needs to attend ITP as a condition of her funding). Your interests may take you to other brown bags too-- race/ethnicity, social movements, gender (AKA fem sem), IRP to name a few. Sample as you see fit, but maintain regular attendance at ITP and at least one other. I am a regular at ITP and dem sem and a more occasional visitor to IRP.