Episode 4 – Mandy Korpusik (MIT Graduate Student) Reflects On Episodes 1-3

Patrick Yurick ,

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We sit down with a graduate student to unpack the previous episodes.

EPISODE CREDITS

Guest Starring Mandy Korpusik, Phd Candidate at MIT CSAIL
Produced & Hosted by Adam Greenfield
Executive Produced by Patrick Yurick, Instructional Designer – MIT OGE
Executive Produced by Heather Konar, Communication Director – MIT OGE

Special thanks to the following editors who provided us invaluable feedback that aided in the development of this show:

Christopher O’Keeffe, Co-Founder of Podcation

Kristy Bennet, Manager – MIT Women’s League

Jennifer Cherone, Phd Candidate – MIT Burge Laboratory

Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC

The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.

MUSIC & SOUNDS

“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)

“The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Attribution License

“Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

EPISODE SCRIPT

ADAM GREENFIELD

Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate research population.

My name is Adam Greenfield and in this special episode, we’re going to get a different perspective on the things we’ve heard so far.

We asked a few MIT grad students to listen to the interviews we conducted with these great speakers, then provide feedback on what they heard.

In this episode…….

MANDY KORPUSIK: GRAD STUDENT

My name is Mandy Korpusik and I’m studying natural language processing in the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory.

ADAM GREENFIELD

Meaning….

MANDY: GRAD STUDENT

So, a lot of my lab mates work on speech recognition but I’m interested in what’s coming back from the speech recognizer. So if someone is using Siri, kind of understanding what they’re asking and how to respond back to them.

ADAM GREENFIELD

Which makes the diet tracking app Mandy is working on pretty cool.

MANDY: GRAD STUDENT

I’m trying to understand if someone describes their meals naturally, what the foods are that they ate and then what the nutrition facts are.

ADAM GREENFIELD

In terms of this podcast about communication and audience, what Mandy’s attempting to do is create an app that is an audience for the user, an audience that can understand the speaker and even respond accordingly and with accuracy. Pretty cool.

Alright. So we asked Mandy to give a listen to the conversations with a few of our speakers so far and her reaction, fortunately, was positive. Especially when it came to Professor Chomsky.

MANDY: GRAD STUDENT

I liked the interview with Professor Chomsky because for one thing I’m studying natural language processing so I took linguistics classes for my minor. So Chomsky is really famous in our field so that was cool. And even the stuff about tying it to education because I’m interested in education.

NOAM CHOMSKY

In the educational system that means, in the classroom following advice that former faculty member here, Viki Weisskopf, expressed very well, that the purpose of the lectures is to help- it doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you DIScover. That’s the purpose of education, and that extends to other aspects of social life, as well.

MANDY

I taught for the Women’s Technology Program last summer and so one of the things they kind of trained us on was how he said you’re leading your students to discover knowledge instead of covering the knowledge. I liked that.

ADAM GREENFIELD

Mandy also pointed to how Professor Horn’s story of losing her audience was powerful because it proves that your work requires motivation for your audience to be involved and invested.

YANG SHAO-HORN

typically, if we want to communicate effectively, we want people to be on board with what we actually are discussing and very importantly to relate our materials to something that people actually in the audience, they have some experience with. So, there are certain points where people can connect and follow.

MANDY

(find quote that’s like “Yeah, I like that”)

ADAM GREENFIELD

When it comes to something Mandy may start using for her own lectures or talks, she can thank Professor Condry for that one.

MANDY: GRAD STUDENT

I liked the part where it was towards the end where it was saying if you notice your audience is kind of falling asleep or not paying attention anymore, then you can just try to hook them again and say,

IAN CONDRY

you know what’s really interesting?

MANDY

Ok, I should try that because when I’m teaching, that’s when it happened the most often, when the high school girls were just kind of getting tired of my 9:30 lecture and falling asleep. Yeah, so. I liked that.

ADAM GREENFIELD

When we spoke with Mandy, she was getting ready to give a significant talk. Was she nervous any?

MANDY: GRAD STUDENT

I feel pretty good but I’m mostly nervous because it’s my first talk at a big conference. I’ve given one technical talk before but that was a small workshop so this is a bigger one. Oh, answering questions. That’s what also makes me nervous. Yeah, because I’m like, what are they going to ask me? Are they going to ask something super tough?

ADAM GREENFIELD

I’m thinking a follow-up podcast to find out how it went is definitely in order.

Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

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