SEMINAR – K. MCINTYRE
Today I gave an invited talk at Anhui Normal University about my recent Bitcoin research. What does that have to do with tiehua? Absolutely nothing, but I digress. As a professor at a small, teaching college, I don’t get to give lengthy seminars like this very often—I’m more used to 20 minute conference presentations—so I was very excited.
My talk went well, I think. Language barriers were huge; I can’t speak a word of Mandarin, and the Economics and Management faculty couldn’t speak a word of English. In short, this had all the makings of a sloppy mess, if not for the heroic translation efforts of Dr Fang, whose technical business Chinese was top-notch! The discussion afterward was lively and fun, and the 90 minutes flew by.
Note to self: when/if this happens again, put more equations on your slides; math really is the international language of economics. Usually, when I prepare presentation slides like this, I cut as much of the technical material as possible and focus on intuition. Usually that is a good strategy, but doing the opposite would have been with a non-English speaking audience. And it would’ve kept Dr Fang from wanting to jump out of a window when it was all over.
