The Alt-Ac Job Beat Newsletter Post 19

Hi Everyone,

Advice this month is practice talks. Even now at work if I need to give a talk to a big group I will practice excessively (out loud to myself, to wife, etc.). When I don't do this I tend to ramble, forget things I intended to say, and be more nervous. Practicing makes me feel much more comfortable in the moment.

Generally most people do not need very detailed description of methodology in talks. (This is true for most academic talks, but is especially true in public/private sector talks.) People care more about the general idea of the talk and then substantive findings. You can leave the sausage making methodology to people asking questions at the end.

Also it is better to be short than long. If I have 10 minutes, it is not bad to only take 5 minutes. My general rule of thumb is a slide will at minimum take 1 minute. So if you have X minutes, I typically plan on having X/2 slides. But then I practice and get the timing down.

JOBS

Recently added positions include:

If you want to be able to add jobs to the board let me know and I can give edit access to the google sheet.

EXAMPLE SCIENTIST

Josie Wolfe works internally at Greensboro PD as a scientist doing research oriented projects. Masters in CJ from Northeastern and currently getting PhD in Education (with focus on measurement/evaluation).

TECH TIP

The massive pace of innovations and models for LLMs is hard to keep up with. The web blog of Simon Willison is my favorite resource. He also has many tutorials on using these different models with different tools he has built. (Almost has pushed me to buy a Mac to be able to run these large models locally.)

Best, Andy Wheeler