6 Years in 10 Minutes

I have UROPd in two different labs, one with a graduate student in neuroscience and now with a post doctorate in biological engineering. I have seen what it is like to put your blood, sweat, and tears (hopefully not actually into your precious samples) into a project for years and years and years. That is why when it came time to pick an article to present for my Journal Club presentation, I was quite overwhelmed. How could I present the material accurately with my very minimal background in biology? How could I present something that I myself don’t understand at first glance? And most of all, how could I do justice to someone else’s research baby? 

It was alot. I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know where to start. I ended up choosing an article involving the hematopoietic cell hierarchy and leukemia because I knew a number of other colleagues in my lab did work in that area, something that I myself was very unfamiliar with. It was something I was very interested in, so I thought it would be a good way to start expanding my knowledge on the subject. 

I started the preparation of my presentation by first understanding the article to the best of my ability. I read through it a first time in order to get the gist, which honestly did not go so well. There were a ton of words I had not even heard of, and there were a lot of techniques I was not familiar with. The next time I read through it, I got my pencil and highlighter out with Google open right beside me. I went to town- highlighting and annotating the article while googling every word and concept I did not fully understand. This took hours, but I felt significantly better after diving into the nitty gritty components of the experiments. All the while, I made sure to understand what each figure was showing and what experimental procedures were implemented to produce the certain results. Ultimately, I got the most out of the figures because they forced my attention towards the most significant results in a visual manner. Following this read through, I attended office hours to clarify any last questions I had. 

Then, I decided what story I wanted to tell. This was rather difficult because the article shared a wealth of information that I could not possibly cover in a 10 minute presentation. I sifted through the figures, and decided on a story that I thought was most important and logical to follow from the results. My goal for the actual slides were to include a minimal amount of information to not overwhelm the audience. Finally, I practiced a number of times , getting feedback from my definitely-not-biology-majors friends (something I will work on in the future. 

After the presentation, I felt like I had gained a lot. Not only had I gained the confidence to explain someone else’s work, but I had also began to develop skills to understand work that I had never learned anything about before. Although the task was incredibly daunting at first, I definitely feel more prepared about how to approach papers that are thrown my way.