Even though I
always get nervous before giving presentations, I’ve always had the slightly
unpopular opinion that public speaking is fun. However, when we were first
assigned journal club, I was a little more nervous than usual. This would be
the first time I gave a presentation like this, and I knew how much work I
would have to put in to do well. In addition, I was nervous about how much of
my grade this presentation would be worth. Needless to say I was a little
intimidated and overwhelmed trying to choose which paper to use. The list on
the class wiki seemed infinite, and many of the topics looked pretty
interesting. I ended up settling on one about hematopoietic stem cells that
looked cool, but felt a little like one of my favorite memes featuring Mr. Krabs
when I tried to read it:
Reading, or
rather decoding, this paper was probably one of the most difficult parts of the
process for me. As interesting as the subject matter was, there was a lot of
terminology and methods that were used that I was unfamiliar with, and the
paper was quite long. Thankfully, I realized as I chose my paper that I wouldn’t
have to decode my paper alone (shout out to Micayla who happened to pick the
same paper for the team effort). Although Micayla and I worked completely
independently on our presentations and ended up actually telling very different
stories, we both agreed to discuss the paper together as we read it to make it
slightly more understandable. We started this process pretty early so that we
could go to office hours to ask about the figures that confused us, which was
also incredibly helpful.
One of the
other most difficult parts of the process for me was trying to figure out
exactly which story to focus on in my presentation. My paper addressed many
different DNA damage repair pathways, and it took a conversation with Leslie to
finally figure out which of these to focus on to break the paper down to a
manageable presentation. I ended up choosing to only focus on NHEJ and MMEJ,
and making this distinction was super important for my progress on the project
(before that I was literally just staring at a blank powerpoint, not knowing
what to do with myself…because that’s productive…). Once I had my focused story,
I was able to much more effectively decide what parts of figures should be
included, and having the help of the Comm lab and Leslie to read over my work
was extremely helpful to the process of refining my slides.
When the actual
day arrived, I was riding on a pretty slim night’s sleep (I had two psets also
due that day), and I honestly was super ready for spring break, but I managed
to give my presentation without falling asleep mid-sentence, which I consider a
success. Overall, I do think I enjoyed giving this presentation, despite the
stresses of the night before.
Re-watching
my presentation with Noreen was…quite the experience. Don’t get me wrong, it
was useful and I’m glad I did it, but it wasn’t something I was totally used to
doing, which I’m sure is a common among other 109ers. It was already really
strange watching myself talk for my mini presentation, but watching myself talk
for an entire 10 minutes was…take it away Mr. Krabs
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