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?