The Hidden Power of the Invited Talk

Kay Herschelmann

For scholars, the phrase “publish or perish” has become an ironclad rule of academic career development. Without a sufficient number of publications in the right kinds of journals, tenure and promotion are just a pipe dream. But another, much less studied aspect of faculty work can also shape the arc of a career in the professoriate. It is not teaching or service. It is the invited talk.

The talks can take many forms. There are the ever-popular seminar series, lectures, colloquiums, workshops, symposiums, and keynotes.

These invitation-only spots come with their own codes and meanings, and often reflect disciplinary mores that can be inscrutable to people early in their careers. And careers can be shaped by them.

“It’s expected that you go out and talk about your work,” said Richard M. Reis, longtime publisher of the e-newsletter Tomorrow’s Professor and author of a book on how to prepare for an academic career in science and engineering. “That’s just part of the job.”

But invited talks aren’t just about getting in front of graduate students, postdocs, faculty members, and at times the general public. The talks are more than potential opportunities to collect the occasional honorarium.

Being invited to give a talk increases the visibility of professors and signals to others that their work is attracting attention in their field — two of the tenets of tenure and promotion, with international invitations often used as evidence of renown for those looking to become full professors.

A stellar performance during an invited talk can also lead to a scholar’s first (or next) job. A future collaborator might be in the audience. There’s the built-in perk of jet-setting around the world to speak at various institutions. And the feedback that scholars get on their talks can play a key role in sharpening the focus or direction of their research agendas.

“People see the papers you publish, but if you don’t give talks, they don’t know you,” said Arne Gennerich, an associate professor in the department of anatomy and structural biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. For the past nine years, he has given career-advice seminars at his institution. “One of the best ways to make yourself known to people is to get invited to talk at universities and at conferences.”

Graduate students and early-career professors sometimes struggle to understand the nuances of invited talks. In online forums, they frequently want to know what talks count as “invited” and whether listing invited talks will be viewed as padding a curriculum vitae. (The consensus seems to be that it depends on the discipline and the career stage.)

Another question is whether a research presentation that’s part of a job interview — arguably the most consequential talk of an academic’s career — should be listed on a CV as “invited.” (Some seasoned scholars say yes, because the reason for the invite doesn’t matter; others say no, a talk that’s part of an official interview process doesn’t count.)

“For me this is simple — were you invited to give the talk or did you volunteer yourself?,” read a post on a thread about invited talks in The Chronicle’s online forums. “If you were invited by a department/conference/whatever then it’s an invited talk. If you weren’t invited then it’s not.”

Another question posted to the forums, on whether to include job talks as invited talks on a CV, brought contradictory replies: “Not in history. It’s padding,” and “But it isn’t an invited talk — it’s a job interview” and “The answer I’ve gotten in my field is to absolutely include them, if they were advertised as a department seminar (which is typical in my discipline), and to put them in the same category as any other invited talk at a campus.”

That kind of passionate discourse about invitations, however, reflects a point of consensus among some academics: An invited talk could potentially be a job talk. So be prepared.

“Every talk that you give is really key in showing people that you could be a future colleague,” Gennerich said.

How does that work? The faculty members who come out to hear a colleague talk about his or her work are the same ones who sit on search committees when their department is ready to make a hire.

A good invited talk “might suddenly create some sort of spark among the faculty that this person sounds really, really interesting, and maybe this is someone we want to hire,” said Shai Shaham, a biologist at Rockefeller University who chairs the committee for the institution’s Friday lecture series. “It’s pretty rare, but it can happen.”

If it does happen, people seem skittish about discussing it, perhaps out of fear that the talk helped them circumvent an open-search process. A post from a reader of the FemaleScienceProfessor blog sheds further light on the possibility: “By the way, every talk *is* a job talk,” the reader wrote. “My career is based on an invited talk that turned into a job, so I can attest to the truthfulness of this statement.”

David C. Kang, a professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California, has worked to help graduate students there take advantage of such a moment. He gives a seminar titled “Every Talk Is a Job Talk” that provides basic tips on how to do presentations, including the importance of practice and preparation. He said he realized early on that some graduate students didn’t know how to present their work or understand the role that doing so effectively can play in a competitive marketplace.

“I think the message is really getting across to students,” Kang said.

At Stanford University, some students will benefit from the fruits of an invited talk. A workshop last year, in the engineering school, featured talks by leaders in the 3-D-printing field from Europe and the United States. A trio of professors from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology gave presentations, and one of them will return to Stanford this summer to teach a course.

Although it’s uncommon for invited talks to yield employment opportunities, they can shape a scholar’s career in other ways as well. Some speakers score a research collaborator, especially when invited to speak at disciplinary conferences.

A pediatric researcher from Michigan State University told the Detroit Free Press that after he gave an invited talk at a hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., a medical geneticist in the audience contacted him, and the two worked together to identify a new genetic syndrome in a 3-year-old patient who had been undiagnosed for more than three years. The geneticist described “a light-bulb moment” as he sat in the audience. And when he contacted the invited speaker and shared his ideas, the pediatric researcher was caught off guard. “I almost fell out of my chair,” André Bachmann told the paper.

The conversations that speakers have before and after talks while being hosted on campus are “just another route to make the connections that you might need later on for your research to advance,” Shaham said.

Gennerich agreed. “Every time you give a talk at an institution, you will talk to many professors one-on-one and you will meet people with whom you might even collaborate. The more people you get to know, the better.”

Courtesy of Arne Gennerich

For some professors, though, invited talks can replicate existing structural inequities that make it difficult to get to know other people in the first place. A recent paper documenting the gender dynamics at play in invited talks appeared in a 2017 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team of researchers examined the pattern of invitations that were extended to scholars in biology, bioengineering, political science, history, psychology, and sociology at the nation’s top 50 institutions, as defined by rankings in U.S. News & World Report. They identified 3,652 speakers and found that male professors gave more than double the number of talks than women did in 2013-14.

The gender difference held up across ranks and disciplines and could not be attributed to self-selection; the researchers checked whether women turned down invitations at higher rates (they didn’t). One reason for the gap, the study showed, could be the professors who do the inviting. Men overwhelmingly invited other men. But women, who typically have more women in their networks, sponsored talks that featured almost an equal share of men and women.

“Bias could be one contributor to the results,” wrote the researchers. Another could be what they called the “availability heuristic,” or the notion that the smaller number of female professors in certain disciplines leads them to be “hyperaware” of other women in their fields when they extend invitations. The lead author of the report was Christine L. Nittrouer, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Rice University.

In general, said Sandra E. Black, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin who is frequently invited to talk about her work and lists two decades’ worth of talks on her CV, invitations beget more invitations. This can be both good and bad. It helps if people already know who you are.

“Sometimes we try to invite people who we don’t know and who are young, so that we can get to know them,” Black said. Such an invite can increase a young scholar’s visibility and lead to further requests to speak.

At some point in an academic’s career, getting invited to share your work is less about making a name for yourself and more about making use of an on-the-job perk. William H. Beezley, a professor of history at the University of Arizona for more than two decades, has given more than 150 invited lectures and seminars at universities. His CV mentions talks in locations in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, as well as in Australia, Italy, and France.

Beezley, a scholar of Mexican history, has plans to increase that number. This month he was looking forward to speaking at Colorado College, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and the University of Denver.

“I’ve been telling people that I’m going to Colorado to do my Pikes Peak tour,” Beezley said. “I’m excited about it.”

Beezley said he used to list all the invited talks he’s given on his CV, but now he doesn’t. The list is simply too long. “I don’t really need to worry about doing that now.”

Indeed, for senior scholars, talking about your work in front of an audience is less about promoting yourself and more about getting new research in front of people who can help refine it.

“Senior professors give lots of seminars, and that’s how your research gets better,” Black said. “You present work in progress, there’s more back and forth, and you get feedback when you’re there. Seminars help research productivity a lot.”

Beezley said he had yet to give a talk where “at least one question or one comment didn’t make my treatment of the subject better.” He also uses talks to float new ideas.

“You can write drafts and send them to friends,” he said. “Or you can just try it out live in a talk.”

At Rockefeller, Shaham’s approach to seeking out speakers is to look for the scientists who will “tell us an exciting story” and whose disciplines aren’t represented there. That opens the door for professors to get inspired by work that’s not in their field and to “think differently about what it is they’re doing.”

And sometimes, that’s just what scholars need.