An “official communication” from early June demanded that all Engineering and Computing postgraduate students take part in the Curtin Engineering & Computing Research Colloquium. Those who didn’t might be placed on “conditional status”, the message warned.
A slightly rebellious instinct led me to think of ways to obey the letter but not the spirit of this new requirement. Particularly, the fact that previous colloquiums have been published online introduced some interesting possibilities:
- a randomly-generated talk;
- a discussion of some inventively embarrassing new kind of pseudo-science/quackery; or
- the recitation of a poem.
In the end I yielded, and on the day (August 25) I gave a reasonably serious and possibly even somewhat comprehensible talk on a controlled experiment I’d conducted on defect detection in software inspections.
A while afterwards, I received in the mail a certificate of participation, certifying that I had indeed given the talk I had given. It felt a little awkward. Giving a 15 minute talk isn’t something I’d have thought deserving of a certificate. It might be useful for proving that I’ve done it, since it now appears to be a course requirement, but a simple note would have sufficed.
Interestingly, I later received another certificate, identical except that my thesis title had been substituted for the actual title of my talk. In essence, I now have a piece of paper, signed personally by the Dean of Engineering, certifying that I’ve given a talk that never happened.