Ask Mister Language Person

Posted on by Chad Orzel

What’s the difference between a “seminar” and a “colloquium”? Is there a difference?

19 thoughts on “Ask Mister Language Person”

  2. I tend to think of a seminar as primarily intramural, sometimes just within a department. A colloquium is often open to a wider audience (and thus also usually gets better publicity).

  3. When I was in grad school, seminar usually meant grad students were forced to attend (to get that vital seminar credit on the record!) and there was a 50-50 chance that another grad student would be presenting. A colloquium usually meant an open-to-the-public event that was put on by the department, featured a visiting professor or just-published results within the department, and advertised heavily around campus. Grad students were not forced to attend, though it was certainly a not-mandatory-yet-mandatory situation.

  4. At my university, we defined them as follows:

    “Seminar” — an informal presentation on on-going research by grad students, postdocs or faculty to a smallish group in the Department whose were primarily interested in the subject at hand, which was treated at a “specialist” level. Only coffee /tea.

    “Colloquium” — the (usually) monthly formal affair, involving the entire Department and perhaps even some chemists or engineers, with a more-or-less famous external speaker, giving a broad-ish overview of current research in a “hot” field. Coffee and doughnuts before or after. Dinner at the Faculty Club for the invitee and selected members of the Department.

    FWIW. YMMV.

  5. I don’t know how well the two terms are differentiated in practice, but according to numerous dictionaries, yes, there is a difference.

    (Firefox has a really nice plug-in for Dictionary.com. I use it all the time.)

  6. And then there was the Public Lecture, to which the entire University was invited, with an extremely famous speaker giving an accessible account of his/her prize-winning research. Could be in any field. Sometimes open to the public. Twice a year max. Reception and dinner only for very senior members of the University.

  8. They differ by target audience (and thus also by who actually attends). Colloquia are basically targeted to the whole physics department, regardless of specialty or level of expertise. Seminars are usually subfield specific and one aims at the experts in that subfield (although they may not be experts in the part of the subfield you will discuss).

  9. Summary of the responses so far: It’s completely random. They’re both some sort of gathering where something scholarly is discusses. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how they’re different, but there’s no pattern to these opinions.

  10. Seminars usually have smaller audiences and are intended for specialists in a subfield; colloquia have larger audience and are intended to be accessible to everybody in the relevant department. For example, at the Penn math department we have a “Mathematics Colloquium” with average attendance perhaps 40; we have “Algebra”, “Analysis”, “Geometry”, “Combinatorics”, etc. seminars, each of which probably have an average attendance of about 10. The difference in attendance probably reflects the fact that less people expect to understand the seminar talks than the colloquium talks; most faculty and grad students come to most colloquia and most meetings of one (or perhaps two) of the various seminars.

    Also, colloquia are preceded by food.

  11. I don’t see how #9 reached that conclusion.

    The consensus is clearly that a colloquium is *intended* to be heard by a broad audience, hence the hope (often a vain one) that important parts of it will be clear to any graduate student and bright undergrad, not to mention most of the faculty. Bribery is required to get attendance because that intent is seldom satisfied in practice, but famous names must not be insulted.

    A seminar is intended for specialists, with the hope that at least one person in the audience will understand it. 😉 Many places have a way of identifying a seminar that is intended as a colloquium for everyone in that sub specialty, and warning off everyone else when the host knows it will be an exceptionally technical talk.

  12. Agree with #11.

    Colloquia are for anyone in the broader field, seminars are anything more specialized.

    I agree with the food bit, too. Though here at UMN, the astro department has food AFTER their colloquium. Those wacky astronomers, always doing everything bass-ackwards.

  14. I’m with the majority here, especially Isabel #10. In a department with a Ph.D. program, the target audience for a colloquium is usually the first-year grad students; seniors would probably understand most of it, as should all faculty. In an undergrad-only department, the appropriate level would probably be the juniors.

    Seminars are specialized: you don’t expect an astrophysicist to get much out of a condensed matter seminar, or vice versa, so they don’t attend each other’s seminars. If these two groups want to talk science with each other, make it a colloquium.

    You are more likely to find refreshments at a colloquium, but that is not a universal rule. Some departments serve before, others serve after.

  15. I chaired the Physics Colloquium committee for a couple of years, which was among the most enjoyable things I’ve done at Fermilab.

    Our task was to arrange Wednesday afternoon talks for a broad audience of scientists and engineers. Topics didn’t have to be physics, but usually clustered in the physical sciences. The level was pitched at the non-specialist.

    In recent years, we’ve begun having “green” colloquia for the non-specialist, and “orange” colloquia which drill into particle physics. I’m not too pleased by this, as there are other venues at Fermilab more appropriate for highly technical talks.

    There are about 1900 employees here and hundreds of colleagues from other institutions. We have half a dozen or more weekly seminar series in addition to the Colloquium, and some less regular lectures. They are more specialized: accelerator physics, theoretical physics, astrophysics & cosmology, computing. For these, the audience is expected to be hip to the specialty discussed.

    We also have a public “lecture series” (not called a seminar or a colloquium) in the evenings, a few times a year, that brings particle physics and other sciences to a lay audience.

    The flagship series of talks is the Friday afternoon “Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar,” known to all as the “wine-and-cheese” talk. This is hard-core particle physics, and when experimental collaborations have major results to report, they usually do it through this seminar.

    To summarize, my empirically-derived notion is that a colloquium is for a multidisciplinary audience, and that a seminar is primarily for scholars working within a specialty. This is in accord with Eric Lund’s description, posted in #14 above.

  16. I’ll throw in my vote with the emerging consensus — you have astro/condensed matter/high-energy seminars, but physics colloquia.

  17. For what it’s worth, I’ve also seen “seminar” used for specialized courses, at a graduate or advanced undergraduate level.

    I have the impression that a “seminar course” may often involve student presentations and discussion, in contrast to a more traditional lecture course. (The one astronomy seminar course I had was certainly like that.)

    And in some fields, “seminar” gets used for certain kinds of conferences, e.g. the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard.

Comments are closed.