This week, we’re going think about our (your) blog posts. Professor Rao will visit each group to listen and offer suggestions.

Random elevator pitch

Each of you will be selected randomly, without replacement, to deliver an “elevator pitch” for your research project for (up to) 1 minute. The elevator pitch is a short description of

  1. the research question/problem (what are you doing?),

  2. your strategy for answering it (what data will you use? how will you use the data?), and

  3. your (expected) results (if any).

Think of the elevator pitch as a solution to the following problem: you’re stuck in an elevator with an intelligent layperson who asks you, “so what are you working on?” You have at most about a minute to explain what you do and make them care about it. They’re not in the weeds, so you can’t get too technical. But they’re smart and genuinely curious, so you can’t just say “I do this and it works because I’m smart”. A good elevator pitch captures your audience’s interest, explains the intuition behind what you’re doing, and leaves them hungry for more.

1. Sketching out ideas and eliciting feedback

Make sure you each answer every question in this section. There are three purposes to answering these questions:

  1. to clarify your own thinking about what you intend to do, with your peers helping you think through the issues;

  2. to practice communicating what you intend to do, with your peers acting as sounding boards;

  3. to practice actively listening and offering helpful feedback.

There are many ways to structure your discussion. I’ve listed some here, though feel free to experiment:

  • speaker-listener cycles: a speaker is chosen; the speaker says their piece; the listener(s) offers a minute (or some set time interval) of focused feedback after the speaker has finished; the next speaker goes and the cycle repeats
  • all speaking first: speakers say their pieces in turn; listeners take notes; after all speakers are finished, listeners provide feedback
  • interactive: speaker and listener interactively explore questions, interrupting or bouncing between questions as desired (be mindful of time if you do this—it’s easy to get sucked into rabbit holes!).

As the speaker: Your role is to explain your idea in a way which is clear to the listener(s) and can elicit useful feedback/comments. It may help to write down a short sketch of your answers to the questions below before speaking.

As the listener(s): Your role is to help the speaker develop their idea by listening and asking helpful clarifying questions. It may help to check for comprehension with the speaker before you start offering feedback.

Some general notes:

  • Listening carefully is hard. Take notes, and ask clarifying questions.
  • When offering feedback, remember that you are offering your perspective; use “I think” and “I feel” statements to reflect this.
  • When receiving feedback, remember that your classmates are taking time and effort to help you. Listen and ask clarifying questions, but don’t criticize the messenger if you disagree with their understanding of what you intended to convey.

The questions:

  1. What question/problem are you trying to address?
  2. What is the key comparison you want to make? How does this comparison connect to the question you’re trying to address? Are you trying to establish causality? If so, what is the causal statement you want to make?
  3. What kind of data would you use to make this comparison? Who might care enough to have collected that data?
  4. What kinds of confounders/colliders are you worried about? How might you address them, either through study design or choice of control variables?

Once you have finished: You may want to consider doing a second lightning round, where you each try to give updated answers which address the feedback from the first round. If you do this make sure to keep it quick; the goal here is just to test out any course corrections.

2. Context and discussion

Now that you’ve gone through the questions, discuss the ideas themselves. Below are three questions I find helpful in initiating discussions with colleagues; feel free to use these, or not:

  1. What are you excited about and worried about for your own project?

  2. What do you find interesting about your partner’s idea(s)?

  3. What kinds of broader context do you see your partner’s question connecting to? (Be their hype person!)