The Trials and Tribulations of Making a High Qual Story

Back in high school, I worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as a volunteer in a lab. Ironically, the first week I was there, I had to sit in on a Journal Club meeting, which was given by a post-doc working in the lab. He was giving a presentation on varying immunotherapy in adult lung cancer cells.

As an innocent and very inexperienced in cancer research (at the time), I thought what he was saying made sense, up until our Principal Investigator told the presenter to stop, and said his definition of fluorescence was very wrong. Our PI told him to stop presenting because he was misinforming high schoolers (I was one of them :D) about a basic chemistry principle.

So, when it was my turn to give a Journal Club (affectionately called JC) presentation about 3 years later haha, I knew I had to study the basics about my article and to make sure I understood every part of it.

I hit the ground running. I read it, highlighted key results, and read it again. And again. And again.

Me the first few times reading it:

I found the hardest part of crafting my slides was making the story (aka how to begin). So, I met with Leslie (shoutout to Leslie for being the MVP) to help me figure out what parts of the article I wanted to highlight in my presentation. After our meeting, I felt pretty confident in organizing my presentation, and I crafted my story about ATM Phosphorylation via DNA-PKcs.

I felt the easiest part was preparing how I was going to give the presentation. I found time to rehearse my slides to myself, and I even rehearsed my presentation in front of my Simmons friends.

Usually, I start getting very nervous for presenting on the day of.

Me when I realized today’s the day for JC:

I spent a majority of the hour before Journal Club just walking around campus so I could calm myself down. It's a normal thing I do to calm my nerves down, because if I stay in the same place for long periods of time when nervous, I freak out more.

Before I realized it, it was 1 pm, and I rushed over to the presentation room. I was first to give my Journal Club presentation.

Me after JC was over: