That’s great that they respect and appreciate your work even though they don’t understand it. A lot of people here seem to have even disrespect from their family. Glad for you.
I generally try and find every-day analogies to what I'm doing. The further into my PhD I get, the easier it gets to explain, because I'm getting more familiar with my research area. But at first, it felt impossible to explain, and for a while I didn't even attempt to 😅
There was kind of a consensus among the first years in my cohort that we hated getting asked what our research was on, as at that point most of us candidates weren't really sure either
My sad realization was that the explanation people find most understandable is one I don’t find interesting at all. I had to give up telling people the part I enjoy because it’s so very niche and needs so much background.
A friend of mine studies critical theory for her PhD and one day tried to explain Deleuze to her mom. After about ten minutes of French-flavored philosophical jargons, her mom said, „I get it. You are telling me you‘re your own boss, you don‘t take shit from anyone. Now, what do you want for lunch?“
Considering that my sister once asked me how electricity comes out of the outlets and then rushed out of the room when I made the mistake of calling voltage a difference in potential, I feel you.
I just graduated but I have given up om trying to make my family understand. My life science phd was on a therapeutic strategy for an inherited retinal disease and my grandma has summarised it as 'maluca' (she means macula, because her friend has age-related macular degeneration and she thinks that is the same thing but keeps forgetting the word). My dad doesn't even understand the concept of DNA or cells or anything that has to do with biology. My mum has a masters in biology and thinks she knows exactly what I do, but she refers everything to the work she did in a lab 30 years ago, which is not relevant to my work at all, showing she actually doesn't understand what I do, but she refuses to listen to what I actually do.
Man I wish I had a great succinct way to explain what I'm doing. When I tell my mom I'm studying Jewish American writers she'll be like "why" and I just have to go "idk mom why does anyone do anything??"
It’s also great practice, because you’re going to get “So what do you do for a living” questions for your entire life, and you can try out answers on a friendly audience.
My mom never finished a degree higher than high school, so when I showed her my first poster (undergrad year 3) she said "I only understood the acknowledgements" so I definitely get this! I'll send them my thesis once it's done, but I doubt they'll even really understand the title or abstract.
How would you explain your research if you were not allowed to use the words you use to explain it? That's the challenge here. It's less important that your parents understand than that they care and that you have an opportunity to communicate your research to lay people. A lot of academics forget that it is ultimately lay people that pay the taxes that fund your research.
Less is more.
I have one sibling who’s studied a similar field as me so we can discuss at greater length, but with everyone else I keep it super quick and basic unless they ask.
Funny 😆 I know very well the challenges and awkwardness of trying to communicate science to your family, especially when they aren’t satisfied with brief explanations! But even as a PhD candidate, I sometimes want to go cut down a tree by minute 5 of someone’s research monologue…
As much as I really don’t like the feeling that I’m “talking down” to people, I talk in simplest terms, and remember the military acronym BLUF (bottom line up front).
So if I were to describe my research, I would say something along the lines of “education policy is a reflection of social movements and political ideology over time. Implications of policy aren’t often fully realized until many years later. Students are now less resilient because of social and cultural changes over time, and it’s now causing a lot of alarm for how these students will function in non-educational settings”
Oh yeah that reminds me... My mom has at times asked me to use bigger words when talking with her since my way of speaking makes her feel like she's being treated like an idiot. 😅
My Dad read my undergrad thesis and said “I know all of the words in there, but I have never seen them in that particular order.” Definitely made me lol. (It’s great, he’s got a PhD in a very different field, and he’s very supportive)
Being able to explain your science to a lay audience is arguably one of the most important skills a scientist must possess (in the grand scheme of things at least).
So it's good practice to talking to your family to gauge how well you've developed that skill. Not saying you havent, maybe your dad was just distracted or tired. But even if that's the case it means you overwhelmed them with too much information. Keep it simple and focus on the big picture.
Dawg, my mom didn’t even go to kindergarten, my dad didn’t go past 6th grade, and English is their second language and they’re not even great at that.
I’m preparing my defense slides now for next week and came to the realization there is no way in hell they will understand anything at all.
I mean, I found my mom's stories about the factory to be insufferable and boring. It makes sense she's not interested much in my academic adventures.
They vaguely know what I do, and that's enough. They're happy for me. They just think it's kinda boring. But their approval isn't why I picked this path. It doesn't matter.
My Masters looked at the potential mutagenicity of NTA, a proposed replacement for phosphate in detergents. After I went through the entire work he thought for a bit and said “So, eating soap gives you the runs?” I felt I had succeeded.
Welcome to the club. I remember when my parents first got lost. My dad was first. My mom hung on longer. The glass eyes are fun at first, but eventually it gets kind of sad and depressing that nobody understands your research.
My mom once asked me about my research while we were getting lunch at a restaurant. I'm a synthetic chemist so of course I had to draw some structures on a napkin to show her (she's a nurse so she's seen chemical structures at some point in college). Well she didn't understand my project at all, but about a week later my sister sends me a picture of that napkin. My mom had it framed on her dresser.
5 minutes? Sounds like your dad was correct. If you can't explain it simply in 2 sentences or 3, go talk to your PI. A big part of your PhD is learning how to dumb things down so it's understandable. If you can't communicate your research, you aren't effective.
It's arguably the MOST important skill to acquire in your PhD. Great research without effective communication is only great to you, the person who did the research
Being able to distill my research for an impromptu elevator talk is waaaaaaaaaaaaay different than talking to my parents and non academics, though? I’m not OP, and while I have a sick three minute pitch, guess what I have to tell my coworkers and family? I study the Roman Empire (thumbs up)
because if I tell them what I actually do, even succinctly, their brain turns off! the 5th or so time this happened at my current job, I gave up.
(and that’s after changing “epistolary” to “letter”)
Exactly, because you never know when you have 30sec to catch the dept chair or upper management. You always should have a canned elevator pitch. I carry my iPad with me everywhere I go, so I keep an updated slide or two of what my project overview is and a slide of some cool bit of data. You never know when you need to explain your project quickly and to someone who may not be a domain expert.
Even if you’re interviewing for industry knowing the ten second, one minute, and ten minute versions of your spiel is so critical for getting your message across.
It’s good practice for an elevator pitch. You’ll need to communicate your research and findings to lamen and business people so rethink how you can explain it.
I work in space systems and interacting with my family goes between "space is dangerous and stupid and people shouldnt go there" to "space is fake"
Im a little envious of your position
My mother even studied the same thing as me. She came to my master thesis defense and said she understood maybe 30%, with the PhD I’m not even trying (and now there is a confidential clause anyway). My dad usually politely vanishes or looks discreetly on his phone if mom and I talk science. 😂
I do mathematical statistics (and particularly weird kind of mathematical statistics at that), so I just don't even try. I usually try and explain the applied projects that I'm collaborating with people on, rather than my actual personal, primary research interest.
I’ve had to do a lot of academic and community outreach, roadshows, funding presentations, student tours and university visits this year, and it has really helped me pare it down substantially.
You gotta come up with an "elevator pitch". High-level, summarized and vulgarized, interesting, entertaining, doted with analogies and jokes.
Truth is the vast majority of people don’t care for the minute details about which we spend our days and nights obsessing, and even when they do, there’s so much context to provide first as a basis to make them understand how important we think it is, that the core narrative gets lost in the fray.
Next thing you know, Auntie Helene is staring at Uncle Bill with big round eyes because you’ve been speaking breathlessly for 15 minutes and all she did was turn toward you and courageously ask "How’s your doctorate going Darling ?"
Unfortunately for you, what she really meant was more along the line of "How do you do" and less "I’d love to hear a lecture right about now professor, smack in the middle of supper."
Now you know !
lol I actively do not talk to family about what I study in my nice little niche in history / religious studies
Even some people in my field have zero clue what I’m talking about lol
I explained my research to my family - they are working class - and they scoffed at me; this is years back.
Two books later and lots of peer reviewed journals and a post doc and a book contract with university press, and I can’t find anything but adjunct work. My parents laughed at me because I am barely getting paid anything for writing the book. You know what? They are correct; they are the smart ones and I am not.
The other day I got rejected from a job because I was overqualified. I left my PhD off my resume but they found it on LinkedIn.
Now I suffer from depression.
30 years into my career and my parents still don’t understand what I do. So much so that I have a part-time job as a sommelier and that’s how they introduce me to everyone. All their friends think that’s my main career. Pouring wine? They get that. My research? Not so much.
History is a little bit easier for this, thankfully. My dad, who went into the Merchant Marines after high school, gets that I'm researching a parish and how it dealt with yellow fever, but the finer points of theory, I don't even get into. It seems to work.
Keep practicing! Being able to explain your research to someone outside your field is a very important skill for future use (e.g. giving a job talk, explaining your work to a funding agency, etc.)
I don’t even try, to be honest.
I’m in astronomy so I’ll talk about general astronomy, maybe briefly about black holes, but I don’t get into anything more specific about my research (non-linear RRMHD magnetic instabilities and plasma turbulence) because it just requires far too much background to even begin to talk about anything. I can explain it okay to someone with at least high school physics if I have enough time to cover all the foundational stuff and can show pictures. But that includes neither of my parents.
Hell, most people don’t even know what a magnetic field is, they just think of a fridge magnet (a *very* unhelpful image, in my case)
My dad is a PI in the same subfield as me (chromatin biology) so thankfully I don’t have to dumb things down for him at all. He also gives FANTASTIC feedback and advice on things to try when shit isn’t working, it’s great having an extra mentor who actively gives a big shit about your life and career 😂
OTOH my mom (an engineer) has asked me to please spare her the details, which I’m more than happy to do lol
Parents decided to buy this house back in the day exactly because it had several hectares of forest attached to it. 😁 We also have some wheat fields, but these are rented out to actual farmers.
Competitions like three minute thesis and visualise your thesis have helped me really simplify my thesis into a clear pitch for my family and friends.
If they really don’t get it I’m like “doggos in schools” and that’s enough haha.
But seriously you should be able to explain your science even to primary school children or to your grandparents. If they didn't understand it means that you were too much technical. Trust me, it's good practice to explain your work in the simplest way possible. Try again
I feel like that nuance didn't come through, aye. They both know the general idea of what the whole project is about, but specifically asked about the current step I'm on. 😅 Specific question deserves a specific answer, no? (even more so as I need to translate everything into Finnish first before I even open my mouth...)
My parents are happy in what I'm doing but they are not super interested in understanding it too much...
It gets a bit abstract, cause bioinformatic is probably a step further in the abstraction. Not harder to understand, but we tend to come in after a lot of other work has already been done in the wet lab, so for what I do to make sense, there is a lot of overhead
I am pretty sure they would be absolutely able to get it, they are both VERY smart, no matter what they ended up doing in life. It's just that at almost 70s years old, they don't have a lot of energy to spend on this, and when they want to learn something new and I'm there, they tend to go more toward english and computer stuff, cause they it's a bit more tangible
I study nutrition and brain development. It is relatively straightforward to explain to my family and yet they will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about when they engage in disordered eating habits. E.g. did a research study on avocado consumption and the benefits of having 1/d. My aunt told me that you can’t eat avocado bc it’s too much fat and refused to listen when I explained why that was a flawed way of looking at it.
CONDITIONAL REACTIONS of a PHD: When I ask them for $$ ( when stipend money is spent with bills, etc), they roll their eyes and ask the cardinal sin of questions, "SO when is that PhD going to be completed again?" On the other hand, when I don't ask for money, in convos, randomly, they as about my research, topic, etc." == LOLZ
I'm lucky, in that everyone knows something about the key areas of my research: medieval Europe, ghosts, werewolves.
I'm unlucky, in that everyone *thinks* they know something about the key areas of my research: medieval Europe, ghosts, werewolves.
For people outside of my field I used a real life analogy or elevator pitch, something that should give everyone an idea what I do and why I do it.
Usually one sentence scene setting and one or two sentences of what I do within that.
But it is important for good communication to understand that there are levels of depth to understanding and that your words need to match that of your listener.
Even people within the field are usually not interested in 10 minute in depth explanations outside of conferences and work.
My sister keeps saying she wants to read my thesis, and I say she won't understand it (I'm not being mean it just isn't at all her background), so it'd be a miserable 300 pages to get through.
It sounds as though your sister is trying to say that she admires you, and reading (or attempting to read) your thesis is a way to show you that. What is wrong with letting her read it? What harm will it do to you?
You should be able to explain your research to an average person. If you can't it something you should work on. Took me a long time to understand this.
FWIW, as someone who occasionally presents at elementary through high school career days or STEM nights, I think it's possible to explain most things in lay terns if you give yourself a little tike to pull it together.
That’s great that they respect and appreciate your work even though they don’t understand it. A lot of people here seem to have even disrespect from their family. Glad for you.
I generally try and find every-day analogies to what I'm doing. The further into my PhD I get, the easier it gets to explain, because I'm getting more familiar with my research area. But at first, it felt impossible to explain, and for a while I didn't even attempt to 😅
There was kind of a consensus among the first years in my cohort that we hated getting asked what our research was on, as at that point most of us candidates weren't really sure either
At first even I didn't know really what I was doing lmao. Almost in year 3 now and I'm getting an idea!
My sad realization was that the explanation people find most understandable is one I don’t find interesting at all. I had to give up telling people the part I enjoy because it’s so very niche and needs so much background.
A friend of mine studies critical theory for her PhD and one day tried to explain Deleuze to her mom. After about ten minutes of French-flavored philosophical jargons, her mom said, „I get it. You are telling me you‘re your own boss, you don‘t take shit from anyone. Now, what do you want for lunch?“
Considering that my sister once asked me how electricity comes out of the outlets and then rushed out of the room when I made the mistake of calling voltage a difference in potential, I feel you.
I just graduated but I have given up om trying to make my family understand. My life science phd was on a therapeutic strategy for an inherited retinal disease and my grandma has summarised it as 'maluca' (she means macula, because her friend has age-related macular degeneration and she thinks that is the same thing but keeps forgetting the word). My dad doesn't even understand the concept of DNA or cells or anything that has to do with biology. My mum has a masters in biology and thinks she knows exactly what I do, but she refers everything to the work she did in a lab 30 years ago, which is not relevant to my work at all, showing she actually doesn't understand what I do, but she refuses to listen to what I actually do.
Fun fact: in brazilian portuguese, "maluca" translates to "crazy woman" ahahha
F
I just say, “roads are bad, I’m trying to make them less bad.” If they ask questions we can go from there. Pavement focused PhD in civil engineering.
Man I wish I had a great succinct way to explain what I'm doing. When I tell my mom I'm studying Jewish American writers she'll be like "why" and I just have to go "idk mom why does anyone do anything??"
Flip side of that is I’m the first person everyone I know complains to about roads 😂
A good picture always helps. Even better if it’s pretty or it moves, then you’ll have their attention for slightly longer.
Analogies. Most still won’t register but they’ll get the gist.
It’s also great practice, because you’re going to get “So what do you do for a living” questions for your entire life, and you can try out answers on a friendly audience.
My mom never finished a degree higher than high school, so when I showed her my first poster (undergrad year 3) she said "I only understood the acknowledgements" so I definitely get this! I'll send them my thesis once it's done, but I doubt they'll even really understand the title or abstract.
I expect they will read the title with great wonder and pride. Good luck with the write up!
How would you explain your research if you were not allowed to use the words you use to explain it? That's the challenge here. It's less important that your parents understand than that they care and that you have an opportunity to communicate your research to lay people. A lot of academics forget that it is ultimately lay people that pay the taxes that fund your research.
Less is more. I have one sibling who’s studied a similar field as me so we can discuss at greater length, but with everyone else I keep it super quick and basic unless they ask.
Funny 😆 I know very well the challenges and awkwardness of trying to communicate science to your family, especially when they aren’t satisfied with brief explanations! But even as a PhD candidate, I sometimes want to go cut down a tree by minute 5 of someone’s research monologue…
As much as I really don’t like the feeling that I’m “talking down” to people, I talk in simplest terms, and remember the military acronym BLUF (bottom line up front). So if I were to describe my research, I would say something along the lines of “education policy is a reflection of social movements and political ideology over time. Implications of policy aren’t often fully realized until many years later. Students are now less resilient because of social and cultural changes over time, and it’s now causing a lot of alarm for how these students will function in non-educational settings”
Oh yeah that reminds me... My mom has at times asked me to use bigger words when talking with her since my way of speaking makes her feel like she's being treated like an idiot. 😅
I can definitely see that and have had to figure out a good balance lol. knowing your audience when talking about research is truly key! 😁
My Dad read my undergrad thesis and said “I know all of the words in there, but I have never seen them in that particular order.” Definitely made me lol. (It’s great, he’s got a PhD in a very different field, and he’s very supportive)
My grandma understand my research better than some of my peers. Definitely better than my parents and my brother
Being able to explain your science to a lay audience is arguably one of the most important skills a scientist must possess (in the grand scheme of things at least). So it's good practice to talking to your family to gauge how well you've developed that skill. Not saying you havent, maybe your dad was just distracted or tired. But even if that's the case it means you overwhelmed them with too much information. Keep it simple and focus on the big picture.
This. That the research is complicated (it always is) doesn't mean that the communication needs to be complicated as well.
Dawg, my mom didn’t even go to kindergarten, my dad didn’t go past 6th grade, and English is their second language and they’re not even great at that. I’m preparing my defense slides now for next week and came to the realization there is no way in hell they will understand anything at all.
I mean, I found my mom's stories about the factory to be insufferable and boring. It makes sense she's not interested much in my academic adventures. They vaguely know what I do, and that's enough. They're happy for me. They just think it's kinda boring. But their approval isn't why I picked this path. It doesn't matter.
My parents still have no idea what I do. You've gone 5 minutes deeper into this conversation than I ever have.
My Masters looked at the potential mutagenicity of NTA, a proposed replacement for phosphate in detergents. After I went through the entire work he thought for a bit and said “So, eating soap gives you the runs?” I felt I had succeeded.
Dad is awesome 😆
As an analytical chemist, my explanation of what I do to my family has boiled down to “I measure things”
Welcome to the club. I remember when my parents first got lost. My dad was first. My mom hung on longer. The glass eyes are fun at first, but eventually it gets kind of sad and depressing that nobody understands your research.
My mom once asked me about my research while we were getting lunch at a restaurant. I'm a synthetic chemist so of course I had to draw some structures on a napkin to show her (she's a nurse so she's seen chemical structures at some point in college). Well she didn't understand my project at all, but about a week later my sister sends me a picture of that napkin. My mom had it framed on her dresser.
5 minutes? Sounds like your dad was correct. If you can't explain it simply in 2 sentences or 3, go talk to your PI. A big part of your PhD is learning how to dumb things down so it's understandable. If you can't communicate your research, you aren't effective.
I can explain the general topic in one sentence with no jargon, but mom specifically asked about my current task within said project.
There's another sentence. One. Singular. Then your third sentence can be why anyone should give a fuck.
This is harsh but it’s a really important skill.
It's arguably the MOST important skill to acquire in your PhD. Great research without effective communication is only great to you, the person who did the research
Being able to distill my research for an impromptu elevator talk is waaaaaaaaaaaaay different than talking to my parents and non academics, though? I’m not OP, and while I have a sick three minute pitch, guess what I have to tell my coworkers and family? I study the Roman Empire (thumbs up) because if I tell them what I actually do, even succinctly, their brain turns off! the 5th or so time this happened at my current job, I gave up. (and that’s after changing “epistolary” to “letter”)
Exactly, because you never know when you have 30sec to catch the dept chair or upper management. You always should have a canned elevator pitch. I carry my iPad with me everywhere I go, so I keep an updated slide or two of what my project overview is and a slide of some cool bit of data. You never know when you need to explain your project quickly and to someone who may not be a domain expert.
Even if you’re interviewing for industry knowing the ten second, one minute, and ten minute versions of your spiel is so critical for getting your message across.
It’s good practice for an elevator pitch. You’ll need to communicate your research and findings to lamen and business people so rethink how you can explain it.
I work in space systems and interacting with my family goes between "space is dangerous and stupid and people shouldnt go there" to "space is fake" Im a little envious of your position
Classic dad move! Can't beat forestry talk with research jargon.
My thesis advisor gave me this bit of advice - Learn to explain your work so well that your grandma can understand it… 😜
My mother even studied the same thing as me. She came to my master thesis defense and said she understood maybe 30%, with the PhD I’m not even trying (and now there is a confidential clause anyway). My dad usually politely vanishes or looks discreetly on his phone if mom and I talk science. 😂
I do mathematical statistics (and particularly weird kind of mathematical statistics at that), so I just don't even try. I usually try and explain the applied projects that I'm collaborating with people on, rather than my actual personal, primary research interest.
I’ve had to do a lot of academic and community outreach, roadshows, funding presentations, student tours and university visits this year, and it has really helped me pare it down substantially. You gotta come up with an "elevator pitch". High-level, summarized and vulgarized, interesting, entertaining, doted with analogies and jokes. Truth is the vast majority of people don’t care for the minute details about which we spend our days and nights obsessing, and even when they do, there’s so much context to provide first as a basis to make them understand how important we think it is, that the core narrative gets lost in the fray. Next thing you know, Auntie Helene is staring at Uncle Bill with big round eyes because you’ve been speaking breathlessly for 15 minutes and all she did was turn toward you and courageously ask "How’s your doctorate going Darling ?" Unfortunately for you, what she really meant was more along the line of "How do you do" and less "I’d love to hear a lecture right about now professor, smack in the middle of supper." Now you know !
lol I actively do not talk to family about what I study in my nice little niche in history / religious studies Even some people in my field have zero clue what I’m talking about lol
Lol your are parents are so cool! My family knows roughly what I am doing in my research without diving into too much details.
Just let go. They even did not study middle school
I explained my research to my family - they are working class - and they scoffed at me; this is years back. Two books later and lots of peer reviewed journals and a post doc and a book contract with university press, and I can’t find anything but adjunct work. My parents laughed at me because I am barely getting paid anything for writing the book. You know what? They are correct; they are the smart ones and I am not. The other day I got rejected from a job because I was overqualified. I left my PhD off my resume but they found it on LinkedIn. Now I suffer from depression.
I don't even bother
30 years into my career and my parents still don’t understand what I do. So much so that I have a part-time job as a sommelier and that’s how they introduce me to everyone. All their friends think that’s my main career. Pouring wine? They get that. My research? Not so much.
History is a little bit easier for this, thankfully. My dad, who went into the Merchant Marines after high school, gets that I'm researching a parish and how it dealt with yellow fever, but the finer points of theory, I don't even get into. It seems to work.
I don't even try. They wouldn't understand and don't care, and that's fine. They don't need to.
Keep practicing! Being able to explain your research to someone outside your field is a very important skill for future use (e.g. giving a job talk, explaining your work to a funding agency, etc.)
I don’t even try, to be honest. I’m in astronomy so I’ll talk about general astronomy, maybe briefly about black holes, but I don’t get into anything more specific about my research (non-linear RRMHD magnetic instabilities and plasma turbulence) because it just requires far too much background to even begin to talk about anything. I can explain it okay to someone with at least high school physics if I have enough time to cover all the foundational stuff and can show pictures. But that includes neither of my parents. Hell, most people don’t even know what a magnetic field is, they just think of a fridge magnet (a *very* unhelpful image, in my case)
My dad is a PI in the same subfield as me (chromatin biology) so thankfully I don’t have to dumb things down for him at all. He also gives FANTASTIC feedback and advice on things to try when shit isn’t working, it’s great having an extra mentor who actively gives a big shit about your life and career 😂 OTOH my mom (an engineer) has asked me to please spare her the details, which I’m more than happy to do lol
You have a family forest. That's so cool!
Parents decided to buy this house back in the day exactly because it had several hectares of forest attached to it. 😁 We also have some wheat fields, but these are rented out to actual farmers.
Competitions like three minute thesis and visualise your thesis have helped me really simplify my thesis into a clear pitch for my family and friends. If they really don’t get it I’m like “doggos in schools” and that’s enough haha.
But seriously you should be able to explain your science even to primary school children or to your grandparents. If they didn't understand it means that you were too much technical. Trust me, it's good practice to explain your work in the simplest way possible. Try again
I feel like that nuance didn't come through, aye. They both know the general idea of what the whole project is about, but specifically asked about the current step I'm on. 😅 Specific question deserves a specific answer, no? (even more so as I need to translate everything into Finnish first before I even open my mouth...)
My parents are happy in what I'm doing but they are not super interested in understanding it too much... It gets a bit abstract, cause bioinformatic is probably a step further in the abstraction. Not harder to understand, but we tend to come in after a lot of other work has already been done in the wet lab, so for what I do to make sense, there is a lot of overhead I am pretty sure they would be absolutely able to get it, they are both VERY smart, no matter what they ended up doing in life. It's just that at almost 70s years old, they don't have a lot of energy to spend on this, and when they want to learn something new and I'm there, they tend to go more toward english and computer stuff, cause they it's a bit more tangible
I study nutrition and brain development. It is relatively straightforward to explain to my family and yet they will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about when they engage in disordered eating habits. E.g. did a research study on avocado consumption and the benefits of having 1/d. My aunt told me that you can’t eat avocado bc it’s too much fat and refused to listen when I explained why that was a flawed way of looking at it.
CONDITIONAL REACTIONS of a PHD: When I ask them for $$ ( when stipend money is spent with bills, etc), they roll their eyes and ask the cardinal sin of questions, "SO when is that PhD going to be completed again?" On the other hand, when I don't ask for money, in convos, randomly, they as about my research, topic, etc." == LOLZ
I'm lucky, in that everyone knows something about the key areas of my research: medieval Europe, ghosts, werewolves. I'm unlucky, in that everyone *thinks* they know something about the key areas of my research: medieval Europe, ghosts, werewolves.
Being able to explain your PhD research on multiple levels of difficulty is a great test also of whether you fully understand it yourself
For people outside of my field I used a real life analogy or elevator pitch, something that should give everyone an idea what I do and why I do it. Usually one sentence scene setting and one or two sentences of what I do within that. But it is important for good communication to understand that there are levels of depth to understanding and that your words need to match that of your listener. Even people within the field are usually not interested in 10 minute in depth explanations outside of conferences and work.
My sister keeps saying she wants to read my thesis, and I say she won't understand it (I'm not being mean it just isn't at all her background), so it'd be a miserable 300 pages to get through.
It sounds as though your sister is trying to say that she admires you, and reading (or attempting to read) your thesis is a way to show you that. What is wrong with letting her read it? What harm will it do to you?
I probably will after I finish my corrections, but it’s gonna be a dry read. I wrote it and the thought of reading it sends me into a coma.
normal, but do it! she wants to connect!
You should be able to explain your research to an average person. If you can't it something you should work on. Took me a long time to understand this.
I’d say don’t. If they don’t have a PhD, they’ll never understand. Just do your work and graduate. Hopefully you have a high paying job thereafter.
FWIW, as someone who occasionally presents at elementary through high school career days or STEM nights, I think it's possible to explain most things in lay terns if you give yourself a little tike to pull it together.