The Act of Sounding Smart

Learning how to do the journal club presentation was probably one of the best experiences I've had so far on how to actually improve my presenting skills. First off, I always imagined journal clubs as really boring. After all, you have people present on papers that you could probably read up on your own if you wanted the background. Also, you're sitting in a room listening to these presentations when you could be doing actual experiments instead.

Of course, there are some tedious elements of journal club - it would be too much to sugarcoat it as extremely fun. However, there were a lot of really cool and useful aspects of it. First, is that you get to see someone else's perspective on the findings reported in a paper, and sometimes their spin can provide a novel insight that you've never thought of before. Secondly, you get to hear all your peers talk passionately about a piece of research they've really analyzed in depth and get all the highlights of a paper without any of the unnecessary fluff. Not only does this save time, but it also makes the journal club feel like a scientific story time where we get to hear about so many different topics. There were definitely some papers where the results were just truly fascinating/unexpected that made me think "wow this is finding is amazing - I can't believe the authors discovered it."

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, journal club helped me figure out how to improve my presentation skills. My biggest issue is overloading slides with information, mainly because I find it difficult to cut data/figures because I feel everything contributes to the whole picture (I mean otherwise it wouldn't be in the paper).

After reviewing my presentation with Noreen though, I realized that I didn't even touch on some of the data I had included in my slides (partly for time reasons). Although these figures supported the overall storyline, they weren't essential to it and basically just served as extra justification. I also discovered I use the word "basically" a lot in my presentation- something I should probably try to reduce in the future. Overall, I feel like that if I had to journal club again, I'd definitely be able to kill it this second time.