Journal Club

A long time ago back in middle school, I remember walking onstage to compete in our 6th grade's poetry reading competition. Despite the massive crowd and concept of reading a poem out loud, I was filled with the buoyant confidence of a youthful kid and wasn't made nervous by the concept of speaking in front of several hundred people.

Somewhere along the way, that innate confidence vanished and left me as a former shell of my public speaking ability. In preparation for this journal club presentation, I was extremely nervous, both about presenting on a specific scientific topic and having to answer the questions of my teachers. I read through the paper numerous times, as I wanted to be sure that I understood what was going on. I also went through my presentation and enlisted an upperclassman in my fraternity to let me know what he thought of my presentation. When I eventually ended up on stage, I was like...

As I was standing in front of everyone talking during the break from the previous presentation, I was just telling myself, please just remember the title. Be able to look out into the audience and don't forget the title. Despite a few nervous stutters and a couple butterflies still in my stomach, I was able to get through the presentation. While I normally have a slow speech pattern when I am talking, I wanted to be sure that I got through my whole presentation in time.

Based on my rehearsals, it was taking a little bit over 10 minutes. However, after finishing my concluding sentence, I looked down and saw the clock hit 9:35. While glad to have gotten through the whole presentation, I was wondering how the time flew past. Despite bracing myself for the barrage of questions I was about to face, I thought I was able to answer most of the questions reasonably well. The questions did seem to run out pretty quickly, so I'm not quite sure what that says.

Although the journal club experience was stressful, it definitely helped my ability to read a scientific paper and understand what was going on in the experiment. I have not gone through many papers before, so this presentation helped me focus on what was important in the paper while still understanding the details of the experiment and methods. I also got to practice my public speaking, which is something that I felt was missing from most of my MIT experiences so far. While there could always be areas for improvement, I was happy with how my journal club experience went and look forward to other experiences like it in my course 20 time.