Data Driven Insights into the DRSCB Retreat Talks

I happened to attend the Developmental, Regenerative and Stem Cell Biology (DRSCB henceforth) Retreat, that took place over 28th-29th May ’15 at the Cedar Creek Conference Centre, MO. At some point while listening to the brilliant talks, I decided to initiate my little “pet-project” of quantifying observations that reflect on the talk engagements and dynamics.

An overview of the DRSCB talks describing the representation of different labs from WashU, model organisms employed for the studies presented, and trainee/gender participation:

Half of all the speakers hailed from the Monk and Ornitz labs! Overall there was a good mix of post-doctorate individuals (which could either be post-docs or PIs) and grad-students from various labs.

This analysis would be incomplete without mentioning the bread-and-butter of developmental research — model organisms. Mice stole the show clearly, here!

Menfolk dominated the talks, with four graduate students representing the female cohort.

I then decided to ask questions about folks asking questions at the DRSCB Retreat Talks. I classified 75 questions from the 15 talks, and observed a few interesting trends. More analysis ongoing, but here are some that struck me foremost:

Who is asked more questions?

Trainee participation has always been an important aspect of conference/retreat talks. What about how the audience participated in trainee talks at the #DRSCB Retreat?

Talks by post-doctorate speakers typically lasted longer, around 14.4 minutes as opposed to talks by graduate students that usually lasted 13.2 minutes, more than a minute shorter. But more importantly, the median time spent questioning post-doctorate speakers was around 2 minutes whereas graduate students spent more time on answering questions, around 4 minutes; and were typically asked more questions than post-doctorate speakers, the former being asked more than 6 questions in comparison to the latter’s, 2.

When do people ask questions?

Another really interesting question I wanted to explore was to see if the time of the session had any effect on questioning.

With the limited data points I possessed, I wasn’t very well placed to answer this question. However, I do see that fewer questions were asked in the morning sessions.

More profoundly, fewer questions were asked in the Friday morning session. I wonder if the Thursday night celebrations has anything to do with it. Post-party disparity maybe?

Take home message

Hence, if I were a graduate student (which I am) presenting at one of the departmental retreats (which I certainly hope to), I would choose to present in a session when the audience engages the most, i.e. Thursday (in this case) afternoon or evening. And be prepared to answer lots of questions! ☺

P.S. Have more interesting questions you’d like to explore/know answers to? Pretty please, shoot me a tweet! ☺