Day 26 — Brown bag seminar on steroids

Have you ever attended a brown bag seminar? What are they and why are they called like this? What about a seminar on steroids?

Let’s start with the concept itself.

Since traditionally or in the past your lunch would have been packed in a brown bag, a seminar where people take out their lunch bags is called a brown bag seminar. I haven’t even tried googling the origin of the term, so this is entirely based on an explanation I heard from on professor (over lunch).

Now that we have name out of the way, it’s time to talk about the content.

At our department of Industrial Engineering and Management (Aalto University) such seminars are arranged every week (and rightfully, a light lunch is offered there). Every week there is someone from the department, a doctoral student, a professor or maybe a guest giving a 15-minute-long presentation on an article or recent work. After that a 30-minute-long discussion follows.

The objective is to collect constructive and supportive criticism, share experiences, lessons and allow people to get exposed to various ideas.

These are not obligator for doctoral students, but the participation is highly encouraged.

In fact, I attended a few of seminars like this before applying to the program, as a way for me to test the environment and understand more of how the whole academic life works (or part of it).

Yesterday, I attended one session which was actually a part of a bigger seminar, which I called brown bag on steroids. Why? There were more people, there were multiple presentations and the rank of attendees was on average higher than in a typical brown bag seminar. Beyond that there was a shared google doc, where participants added their comments and feedback.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t participate in all of the sessions.

It was interesting to see (or actually hear) how critical feedback from people with long academic background was quite elaborate. Myself, I could ask for clarifying question or share a framework or perspective that could be used on specific problems. Professors, on the other hand, could reflect on the use of specific theoretical frameworks and point out weaknesses in logic.