Putting the 'MINI' in 'Presentation'

Anyone who has ever met me knows I like to talk… alot. As a person of many, many, many words, I have struggled over the years with how to deliver a point in a concise, effective manner. So, when I saw the word “mini” in front of “presentation,” I got a little nervous for the second assignment of module 1. A short elevator pitch was not something I frequented often.   
To approach the assignment, I evaluated every part of our data summary and decided what points were most important to tell a logical, interesting story. I struggled most with the background/ motivation and results section of the presentation because I thought there was a lot of very relevant information that I would try to pack in to the short 3 minutes. However, for the introduction of the presentation, I decided to focus on chemical probes as an important mechanism for understanding more about “undruggable” proteins. Honestly, I thought this would be incredibly attention-grabbing because everyone likes the idea of discovering more drugs to help people in pain. For the results part, I focused on the azaindole core since the result were consistent across the class. I thought the audience would be very excited to hear about a consistent result that showed promise in future studies.
 The most straightforward parts to prepare for the presentation were the methods and the future and implications. The methods portion was the easiest to portray because I had dove in very deeply when writing the different methods homework, so I found the steps very logical to summarize. In addition, I had done quite a bit of background research to look into future and implications, so I felt very proficient in indicating what the most relevant experiments were in the short term. However, I did not know how much knowledge the audience would know, so I am honestly still unclear if people were to understand the future experiments I was referring to. Overall, though, I think it was very clear as to why the research is interesting in pursuit of potential therapeutics.
 Once I decided what story I wanted to tell and the facts I wanted to cover, I worked on transitions to make the presentation flow nicely, even in the limited amount of time. I recorded myself a couple times to evaluate the logic of my statements, and settled on a final product. The time was obviously a concern throughout all of the preparation, but when it came time to record, my material was concise enough to make the presentation work in the 3 minutes, definitely MINI. Not only that, but I also feel exponentially more comfortable being able to prepare an elevator pitch for all different scenarios going forward. I think this was a very good start on my journey towards concise, effective speech.

MINI Cooper

MINI dog

MINI pony