Tochi's Hut

I had agreed to write up my following experience a while back, but never finished.  Finally got around to it this morning in a concerted effort to clear some blogging backlog.

Recently, I have been involved in a couple of situations where I had to pitch an idea in front of a panel of experts, survive their grilling questions and hope for a passing outcome.  Not-so-small investments and recognition are involved, so these sessions are more high stakes than your everyday idea-pitches to your advisors, leads or management.  Several people have told me these sessions are nicknamed "Mini PhD Defenses".  I've never sat through a real PhD Thesis defense, so I really cannot comment on the comparison.

The first one is always nerve racking.  How do you prepare for your defense?  What kind of questions are they going to ask?  In the end, what more can you do to prepare?  You have to know the material you are preparing pretty well.   Preparing an elevator pitch to showcase your idea really helps fine-tune the relevant points.  In front of the panel, you really don't have time to go over the nitty-gritty details until cross-examination, so you want convey the key ideas across first and let the questions drive your technical detail discussions.  I found I was spending more time researching other similar ideas in the field, so that I could answer the true money questions: What makes your innovation unique and different?  What makes it relevant to others?  What contributions to knowledge, profits, customer satisfaction, etc. are you bringing?  Why should we invest?  These are all asking the same thing in the end.  If you cannot effectively answer these questions, go back and do some more homework.  Also, try to expand your scope by thinking of ways to extend your ideas.  This can come as other applications of your techniques or future work to be done.

When facing the panel itself, it can be a little intimidating.  The panel is typically comprised of renown experts in their field.   Typically, the sessions starts with general questions to allow you to sell your ideas.  That elevator pitch I mentioned before is useful now.  I typically follow the layout of an academic paper.  Brief introduction, quick discussion of existing works and what makes the idea unique, description of the core idea, followed most importantly, by results.  You have to make a good impression by the end of this section.  I've sat in a few sessions where people did a poor job conveying their ideas.   It's hard to get people excited if they don't understand or are bored. 

The next section is the onslaught.  The most feared moment of the entire session.  I was a bit nervous the first time.  To an external viewer, questions from the panel are often quite sharp.  These guys did not get to where they are now without being able to ask the right questions or the questions most people don't think about.  In my experiences, I have found the questions generally fall into two categories.  One set is good hard questions about your ideas.  These are the nicest sort of questions, the ones you know how to answer.  Use them to continue to dig deeper into your ideas, always reinforcing its results and relevance.  The second set are questions that are out of the blue.  Most are totally irrelevant to your idea.   For this type of questions, thank the panel member for their question, tell them it is irrelevant to this idea and explain WHY (really important!).  Remember to reiterate why your ideas are relevant in your scope/niche.  There is nothing wrong with telling them that their question is great, but inconsequential to the discussion.  Now, there are also the questions that are relevant, but you've never thought about before!  The big "OMG, why didn't I think of this?" ones.  So far, I've gotten only one such question and I handled it by saying that we had considered that idea, and will expand on it as future work.  Given the time and resource constraints, we thought it was more appropriate to focus our idea to the smaller scope.  That, by no means, imply that our idea cannot be extended to your new perspective.  Furthermore, we can also extend our ideas in other areas, such as blah blah blah... (prepared beforehand). 

If there is one thing I took away from these experiences it is that there is no one else in the world who is more knowledgeable about your idea than you.  These so-called panel experts might understand the field better, but when it comes down to the specific concentration you are addressing, treat them as eager students wanting to learn from you.  If you can sense this from the panel, you are well on your way to success, since they are intrigued and easily sold onto your idea.

The last section is the council vote.  Based on the discussions, you should have a pretty good idea of how many people you convinced.  The rest is just formalities.  It is cool to hear the 'yes' votes come in from around the table.  Like the LOTR council meeting in Rivendell.  Time to pump the fist.  :)

Anyway, I kind of glossed over a lot of the details, but hopefully some of my experiences can be useful to others.