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Basor: I'm Estelle Basor.

Morrison: And I'm Kent Morrison.

Basor: We're both from the

American Institute of Mathematics

and I'm one of the facilitators for

the Careers workshop this week.

One of the components of this workshop

is something called an elevator speech.

Morrison: Elevator speech?

What's an elevator speech?

Basor: Well, an elevator speech is a

short description of your research.

Often when candidates go for a job interview,

they end up being asked what they do

by various people in the department,

during an interview, at dinner,

perhaps in the hall.

So they should have a nice concise

description of their research.

Morrison: Can you give an example of an

elevator speech?

Basor: Well sure.  If it were me, I might say,

"I work in operator theory and I study spectra

of operators, and in particular

asymptotic properties of the spectra.  And I'm

interested in applications of that to

statistical mechanics and random matrix theory."

Morrison:  Well that's great for a mathematical listener,

but suppose you're talking to a Dean who's a chemist

or a Provost who's in the English department?

Basor:  Well, that's a great question.

We emphasize in our workshop that there should be

two versions of this elevator speech,

because indeed that might happen.

You might talk to a Dean who's not in your field,

or just other people in the department that are staff.

So it's good to have a non-technical version of

the elevator speech, one which doesn't use so much

mathematical jargon,

but is understandable, at least in some way,

to the general public.  So as an example

of this for me, I might say something like:

"I study random phenomena and I think about

the behavior of that phenomena over time."

That kind of answer is pretty vague,

but most people understand 'random' and 'behavior',

and they'll get some sense of what you do.

Morrison: Your elevator speech examples

were pretty short.  How long do

you recommend that they should be?

Basor:  They shouldn't be too long,

maybe about 30 seconds.

Often there can be follow-up questions.

When you are practicing these,

it's good to do it with somebody else,

and have them ask you questions, so that

you can be prepared for those as well.