How to ask good questions in workshop
At most universities, professors from other schools will visit and present research they are currently working on. In these sessions, the audience can ask questions and make suggestions. Here are a few suggestions for making workshops productive.
- Do not ask questions or make suggestions to demonstrate your intelligence. You are there to help improve the paper not show off how smart you are.
- Seek to be constructive. Even if you find a fatal flaw in the paper, provide some suggestion for how to fix it (even if it means doing the experiment/archival analysis over again).
- Don't take you questions or the presenters response personally. It is hard to present and be politically correct at all times. Understand that the presenter is under a lot of stress and is trying to do their best to answer questions.
- Don't beat an issue to death. If a few people have made comments about a problem in the paper and the presenter has discussed it, move on to another area. Workshops get bogged down and waste the presenter's time if you stay on the same issue for the entire workshop.
- Read the paper before trying to make suggestions for improvement.
- Not all research is connected to what you do. Be careful not to always tie everything everyone else does to your research (e.g., I'm interested in banking and so every paper has something to do with banking or should have something to do with banking).
- Realize that each research methodology has limitations. Be careful not to spend to much time criticizing inherent limitations to a research methodology.
- Be open minded. If everyone does the same type of research, research would get very boring very quickly. Try and see what are the benefits as well as the costs to research design choices.
