Number One Fear

I know everyone says that they aren't good at presenting, but to me that feels like when someone tells you that they also did absolutely horribly on a test to comfort you, only for you to later find out that they got a B.

I am terrified of public speaking. I don’t think I’ve ever given a presentation that I have felt good about. However, I know that presenting is not something that I can avoid in a job, so I have to continue to practice. I must learn from all of my mistakes so that I can improve each time and advance toward being an effective communicator.

Going into this week, I knew it would be rough. I had a presentation in my French class on Monday, journal club on Tuesday, and a test on Wednesday… and I spent most of the weekend helping for CPW events at my dorm. Ironically, I think it was easier for me to present in French than to present for journal club because scientific writing itself is like a foreign language that I am just starting to learn to read, interpret, and speak. That, and my French class only has four people in it, so I was much less nervous to speak in front of a smaller group.

After reading my article over many times, picking out the essential information, and creating a presentation, I practiced my presentation to myself. Each practice, my time hovered around 10 minutes. I didn’t want to memorize what I had to say word by word because then I become more nervous if I get myself off track during the real presentation. I knew what I wanted to say but made notecards with my main points just in case something went horribly wrong. I went to sleep the night before the presentation knowing that if I thought any more about it or tried to run through it in the morning, I would psych myself out and just become more nervous.

I tried telling myself that it would be fine, but I got up to present and my mind went like this:

The whole presentation was really rough, because I couldn’t remember what I had planned to say. I felt myself relying on my note cards way more than I had anticipated, and I still left out many of the main points that I had planned to say. I completely forgot to mention how the authors obtained any of the results even though that was something that I talked about every time I practiced. I know I lost points for that, and I’m really disappointed in myself for doing so. I also didn’t explain any of the figures the way that I planned to, and I forgot to define some vocab. Near the end of the presentation when I started to feel more comfortable in front of the audience, I glanced at the timer and knew that I was going to finish way too early because of this. There was nothing I could do about the information that I had left out a few slides ago, so I just continued on and ended the presentation as soon as I could.

The question and answer section was easier for me because I didn’t have to speak for long stretches of time. In fact, because I forgot some information during my presentation, I received some questions about things I had already planned to say. It was embarrassing because then I realized that information that was essential to understanding the data was left out, but it made it easier for me to answer these questions because I had practiced this information.

I also received some really insightful questions about things I hadn’t considered myself when reading the paper. This was really cool because it made me think about the research in a different way and consider what other future experiments could be done.

Overall though, I’m just glad that journal club is over. Going back, I wish I had presented in front of BE Comm Lab or my friends so that I had more practice in front of an audience before getting up there. I should have practiced many, many more times, but that would have been difficult to do with the week that I had. Although presenting itself was really tough, I enjoyed reading my paper and really trying to understand all the details of it, as well as thinking about more future impacts of this paper because of questions from my classmates.