Elevator pitch and research program summary

For this meeting, please all prepare (1) an elevator pitch about your program and (2) a summary of your research program. We likely will only hear from 2-3 of you in this meeting, but everyone should use this opportunity to think about what they would say. This might help you think about graduate school applications, job applications, fellowship applications, etc.

Elevator pitch (20-40 seconds of casual speech)

Imagine a person with a general science background asks you what you study. Your goal is to give an interesting very high-level summary that captures what you do and maximizes the probability that your interlocutor wants to hear more about your work.

High-level summary of your research program (.5 to 1 page, '''please write it down''')

This is still intended as a rather high-level summary of your program and interests. But this time imagine you're talking to someone who works in, and has expertise in, the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, and who also has general familiarity with psycholinguistics and language research. That is, you cannot assume that they know your research area, that they understand the value of interdisciplinary work, or that they consider language research inherently interesting. Neither do they know your specific research area. But you can assume that they have some notion of what terms like lexical retrieval, speech perception, language understanding, sentence production, comprehension, etc. To give another example, this hypothetical person will know that "phonology" has to do with sounds, but not how it differs from phonetics or articulation.

This person that you're talking to is going to vote on whether you'll be admitted to the graduate program, whether you're getting the post-doctoral fellowship that allows you to do your own work for three years with whoever you want to, or whether you will be joining their department as faculty.

Try to describe the core of your research program.

  1. What drives your research?
  2. Why? Why is it interesting?
  3. If you get to answer the questions you're after, what will be the value for someone outside of language research (like your interlocutor, who cares about understanding the mind/brain)? What will be value for language researchers.

If you get stuck in preparing this, try to take notes about why you're stuck. What is difficult in trying to do this?

LabmeetingAu18w8 (last edited 2018-09-29 16:57:34 by FlorianJaeger)

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