Journal Club

To be honest, Journal Club wasn't as bad as I thought. It was challenging, for sure, and I learned some things. I'll jump in.

1 - I have not been making visual aids correctly. I've been making my visual aids for all presentations (usually non-scientific) under the assumptions that everybody thinks just like I do. Turns out, they don't. Especially in a few ways...
 a: Other people aren't colorblind. When I make presentations, I choose the colors most clearly distinct to my own eyes, which are blue and orange. Turns out, orange looks pretty terrible on a projector. I'd never even noticed until I watched the tape of my presentation, because I've never watched back a presentation before. What looks beautiful on my computer looks lame on a projector and totally unnecessary to everyone who can differentiate red and green
b: People actually do like pictures. A picture is not worth a thousand words to me. If I see a schematic on the screen, I just look for a caption. I don't even try the figure, because I can never figure them out before the slide has passed. Graphs are fine, but pictures not so.
Turns out everyone else actually understands them pretty well. I think I was the only one who used a text slide as my come-back-to slide, and so I'll try to do that in the future
2 - Presenting for a grade is PRESSURE. I don't think I'd ever been nervous before this one, but when I got up to the front I started feeling it. For the first 5 minutes of the presentation I heard a distinct hollowness to my voice. On video, I sounded completely normal. Good to know for future presentation that that's all in my head.
3 - Papers are so cool. I'm grateful we were forced to really thoroughly understand one paper, methods and all. The first read through was impossible. The second, some things made sense. Not until the 3rd could I actually pick out a small, defineable number of questions to ask, but it was really rewarding to understand the whole thing inside and out.
4 - Obligatory memes/gifs. I wanted to put them in earlier but just didn't really see a place. I guess the Journal Club entry is more serious because the task itself was so unusual. Anyway, here goes.

When I realized I hadn't even looked at the papers the night before the deadline, I was like...

Then I found "the One" and felt like 

Then, after the deadline, I read past the first line...

But in the end, it all worked out. I ended up back where we always do in 20.109, feeling this way and probably looking it too (with my mispronunciation of both "SIRT1" and "etoposide) all the way to the finish: 

Man I love dogs.