Did someone say JOURNAL CLUB?

In high school, I used to feel anxious just thinking about public speaking. Standing up in front of a group of classmates, my palms would sweat, my voice would tremble, and sometimes my body would physically shake as I presented anything. I was just so nervous that I'd say something wrong or stupid, or that I'd forget what I was supposed to say, and I had a lot of difficulty calming these nerves.

Since coming to college, I haven't had many opportunities to improve my public speaking skills. However, I've definitely become a lot more confident in myself on a personal level, and I'm just not as shy and nervous anymore so I was ready to put some work into this journal club and hopefully ~crush~ it.

I decided to present on the second day in order to feel out what the presentations were supposed to entail. I'd never been to a journal club and thought it would be a good idea to watch a few before creating my own. While I did get some helpful hints from the first presenters, all of their presentations were intimidatingly good so it also made me a little bit nervous about whether I'd be able to make something of that high a quality for my own journal club.

Spring break came and went, and despite my best intentions I did absolutely no work on my journal club presentation (honesty is the best policy?? so sry). So I think if I could change anything about how I handled my journal club, it would be that I should have done some work on it over break, but I also don't regret just taking the week off to relax a bit. When I finally got to reading my article and making my slides, I found that creating the images and titles for the slides were not the difficult part, but that I struggled with writing what I was planning on saying. I was really worried about the time limit, and I couldn't figure out what was important to say and what wasn't. My script was long and detailed, but after working on it for a long time I decided just to write everything that i thought was relevant down, highlight the important stuff for when I was going through the slides, and hoping for the best.

In the end, my presentation went a little long, and I definitely messed up one question which was unfortunate but overall I'm really happy with how it went. It was awesome to get up there and speak for like ten minutes about research that a week prior, I had never even heard of. I definitely want to get better, but this experience was really valuable for me and I'm hopeful that next time I'll be able to use what I've learned from this journal club to make the next one even better :)