“You need to slow down.” I bet lots of us heard this sentence when a police officer pull over our car. Today I am not going to talk about that. Instead, I will collect several occasions people ask me to “slow down”, as a student or a teacher.

Slow down and keep calm

My Ph.D. adviser, who is well-known inside his field, often says things like, “Can you repeat what you just said? I am a slow reader.” Or, “Can you go back to a few slides before, I am still processing the definition there.” Every time things like that happened, it turned out I missed something, either in my presentation or in the writing.

Every time anyone in our research group has to do a critical talk, he will “force” us to rehearse several times in front of the whole group, especially when it comes to me. I am not a native speaker. The Chinese education system does not emphasize the importance of giving speeches. I never really did any talks before I came to the states. Giving research talks is not easy, even though you know your research for sure, it is still hard to decide what to put in the talk. Even after you get a well-written talk, to deliver it successfully is totally another story.

After one of the rehearsals, my adviser, said in his deep voice, “You need to keep calm and slow down.” I realized in the middle of my talk, that I rushed a bit since I was keeping track of the time, and I had spent more time explaining a slide than usual. So I did what everyone under this scenario would do: speed up and ramble through the slides after. My adviser caught that and gave me the above advice.

It was extremely simple and yet useful advice. I kept that in mind while I delivered the formal talk. I was very calm and went slowly, telling my research story to the audience that included professionals from Harvard, MIT, Microsoft Research, and NSF (yeah, even my adviser will feel nervous while people in charge of money sitting down there. ) The result, I won the best speaker in the conference. Later I know this is a big booster for my job searching.

“You speak slowly, so they understand you”

Speaking of job searching, my current department head and the chair of the search committee while I applied for my current tenure-track job, said this to me during the dinner after my job talk. I talked about my language skill. (Edit: The article was moved from my medium.com blog. The original article stopped here and I cannot remember what I wanted to talk about next and let’s keep it that way.)