You try and explain your research, and you keep it as technical as possible, cause it is technical

man wearing eyeglasses

Fearing that you might say the wrong thing, you explain your research to your family the same way you have in the background section of your thesis. You don’t leave out any details and you ensure all of your terminology is correct. Step by step, you begin discussing each phase and technique used in High Performance Liquid Chromatography and how the particular compounds you are currently studying appear to be very difficult to analyze with traditional means.

After about twenty minutes, you notice a blank stare creep onto all of your family’s faces by the time you start describing the different mobile phases in an HPLC, you can’t tell if they’re understanding what you’re talking about, if they’re using all their mental capacity to follow, or if they’re blanking out and just waiting for you to quit talking.

What do you do?

Keep explaining!

Wait for some response from your family

Published by B McGraw

B McGraw has lived a long and successful professional life as a software developer and researcher. After completing his BS in spaghetti coding at the department of the dark arts at Cranberry Lemon in 2005 he wasted no time in getting a masters in debugging by print statement in 2008 and obtaining his PhD with research in screwing up repos on Github in 2014. That's when he could finally get paid. In 2018 B McGraw finally made the big step of defaulting on his student loans and began advancing his career by adding his name on other people's research papers after finding one grammatical mistake in the Peer Review process.

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