my worst talk (and my best talk)

This past Wednesday, I had the chance to present on the Signal Recovery project I’ve been working on under the supervision of Prof. Eyvindur Palsson and Prof. Alex Iosovich. Before presenting, I felt fairly confident in my abilities, but as the time approached, my nerves started tingling with excitement and fear. I’d never given a talk before, so right before we went in, Prof. Miller told me: "Today, you are going to deliver your worst talk ... and the best one at the same time". It was a pretty accurate observation. The talk went pretty smoothly, give or take a stumble or two. And my planted joke actually got five whole laughs, so I’m counting that as a success.

My main goal was to maintain the balance during my talk. We didn’t have time to go through all the behind-the-scenes math that my team and I tackled to get the results, and we also couldn’t assume much background knowledge since most of the audience wasn’t in our field. At the same time, we didn’t want people mentally checking out halfway through because things got too dense or too dry. My teammates and I tried to thread the needle - fill in enough context to make the work understandable, but still keep it lively and (hopefully) memorable. And, if I may say so myself, I think we pulled it off.

Next week, I’ll be presenting similar material at the Young Mathematician Conference in Ohio, and I’m genuinely so excited. We’ll be seeing some friends we made at Yale this week and meeting a bunch more.

Huge thanks to Say-Yeon and Meiling for preping the talk with me, to Prof. Steven Miller for pulling the whole conference together and buying us ice cream on the way back, and to Steve for driving us all the way to Yale from Williamstown :)