Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

Questions Outside Your Scope?

16 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief advisory segment, the speaker addresses how presenters should respond when audience members ask questions that fall outside the approved scope of a project or presentation. Rather than bluntly rejecting such queries, the speaker recommends first acknowledging the question’s merit, then clearly stating the current work’s boundaries, and finally suggesting that the topic could be explored in future work. This approach maintains respect for the asker, prevents audience frustration, and keeps the discussion focused on the defined scope.

Chapters

Another category of questions you're going to get are things that maybe are outside the scope of what you've done. Some can be, well, okay, how about this? And you get to say that this was outside what was approved. Now, I wouldn't just say, no, outside of what was approved. I would say, that's a really interesting question. For the boundaries of this work or the scope of this work, we were limited to this area. But in the future, it would be great to explore that. And what that means is, good question, but it's not what we did here, but I'm going to acknowledge you wrote a good question, you did a good question, or you came up with a good question so that, you know, I acknowledge you as an individual. It's when you don't acknowledge people that they get a little antsy and a little maybe cantankerous, and that's when weird questions can arise.