Presenting your ideas and work in science can be really intimidating. Your audience is skeptical and skilled and you know just enough to know how much you don’t know. I’m afraid of crying when stridently criticized during a presentation. My fear of that happening was recently somewhat alleviated. To get upset enough to cry, I’d have to notice that someone was being mean. It turns out that I’m pretty oblivious.

During my recent lab meeting presentation, someone higher up in the academic hierarchy (Let’s call them Shuah) expressed some confusion over why I was using [method x] instead of the easier [method y]. I’d actually considered method y and rejected it because [method y] would give meaningless output in my situation. But I forgot that fact in the moment  and instead sort of agreed with Shuah.

After thinking about Shuah’s criticism and the valid need for a backup simplification plan in case [method x] is too hard, I discussed my ideas with my advisor. When I mentioned Shuah’s comments as the inspiration for [method x version 2], she told me that Shuah’s comments were unnecessarily harsh. I hadn’t noticed at all. My takeaways from the interaction had been:

1. Explain [problem aspect z] better so that people don’t think [method y] is an appropriate simplification
2. Stop and think for a minute before agreeing with criticism

I wasn’t upset at all by Shuah’s comments and didn’t notice anything at all harsh in their tone. Which leads to a third and perhaps more important lesson from the interaction (and my advisor’s comment on it): if I didn’t notice a criticism presented harshly enough that my advisor thought it worth commenting on, I’m probably not noticing when my own comments are unnecessarily harsh.

So from now on, I’m going to try to think a bit more about how I present my criticism. While crying in front of an audience would be awful, so is making someone cry.