What's a Blog: What's a Journal Club?

Oh yeah.  Journal club.  That happened.

To be quite honest, it really wasn’t that bad.  It was hard, don’t get me wrong, but given the amount of prep work and time we had to finish it I think it was a fair assignment.  The events leading up to it, however, really defined what the MIT firehose has to offer.  On top of having to do 2 more assignments and study for an exam I had to prepare an entire 10-minute presentation on something I only loosely understood… y’know writing that down kind of makes it sound a lot worse than I thought it was.  But hey, Spring Break also happened!

All jokes aside, it was a nice experience trying to really delve into another person’s work and gain enough of an understanding of the material to be able to explain it to other people.  I’ve given many presentations before so public speaking really wasn’t the problem.  What really got to me, was the fact that I had no idea what to say.  I think I understand how a professor might feel when they have to go up in front of a large audience and just explain things for an hour.  Being able to talk about one thing for an extended period of time is already hard enough and now we have to do it without people losing interest, confusing people, or confusing ourselves.

In the end it all came down to how much practice people had explaining their own material.  After watching everyone’s presentation, it was very evident just how much effort people had put into their presentations.  From one slide to the next, every bit of information, every figure was carefully put in just to make sure a broad audience could understand what was going on.  And with the actual presentation, there were people that really knew how to get up on stage and captivate an audience.  It might seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but it really does make a difference when someone says the exact same thing with or without enthusiasm.

This was an interesting assignment seeing as how I’ve never had to get up and talk for that long in front of an audience of people.  Knowing that researchers have to do this on a regular basis really adds on another level of appreciation for scientists in general.  Keeping up with the latest research in any field must be just as time consuming as actually conducting the research, so people don’t really get breaks in academia.  Not only that, but it’s imperative that we are all able to communicate our findings to one another.  I feel like I could've done better on this assignment, maybe if I had more time or less assignments, but in the end it just encourages me to work even harder and push towards improving myself as a researcher.