The deadline struggle continues

It's definitely ironic that I wrote my first blog post on deadlines, because here I am- slightly too late. And there I was, the Wednesday before our next Tuesday journal club presentations, frantically trying to finish a presentation I thought was due on Thursday.

*sigh*

Thinking that the journal club presentations were due almost a week before they were actually due actually helped me craft my presentation much faster.  One of the bigger struggles that I usually face is getting started. Usually, I open up powerpoint, start my first slide, and three hours later have something similar to this:

Believing that I had approximately 6 hours to midnight, and only a few more until the deadline, I didn't really have the luxury of dawdling on the first word. I sat down, and gave myself a time limit: 5 minutes per slide: writing only as much as was necessary- nothing more, nothing less. Of course, my own 5 minute/slide time constraint wasn't very well kept, however, I discovered how efficient it was to write all my thoughts first and edit later.

I eventually finished my rather 'unfancy', but thorough, powerpoint around 3 am.

The next morning, just for fun, I checked the deadline on the presentation- who knows, maybe I had other homework to do.. and there it was. Journal club- tuesday.

Well. This was a the better version of all the mistakes that could have happened. Had I thought it was due on Tuesday, I probably would not have completed it that night. I would have taken an assignment that took a few hours and dragged it out for a few days. But now, I felt so prepared for journal club. I knew what I was going to talk about a week in advance. This was a wonderful feeling. And even though I stumbled upon it by accident, it was so wonderful that it convinced me to start my next paper assignment significantly earlier than I usually would.

There I was, on Sunday, practicing my journal club presentation, when I began to second guess myself. Was my story too broad? Did taking on two different experiments in one presentation overload the audience? Do I have too much to say? I practiced my presentation and finished it in 9:00. I practiced and finished it in 12:00. I did it again and finished at 8:30. I couldn't get it to the perfect time no matter how hard I tried. Eventually I had to compromise with myself. I needed to finish my second to last slide by 8:30. If that meant rushing that slide, or dragging it out slightly, that's fine. I knew that if I hit 8:30 by that slide, the last one would take me about a minute and a half.

And then came journal club presentation day. I was irrationally nervous, because I really did know the overall story of my paper. Being up there, I had so much to say and go through that I managed to forget all of my nervousness. I was trying to hard to make sure people know what I was talking about that I think I might have said "the researchers expected [this] because [that]" at least 20 times. I have no idea if I said 'uh'. I have no idea if I went too fast, or too slow. All I know is that I managed to get through all the slides, and I manged to do it around 10 minutes.

As much as I think watching myself on a video may be awkward, I'm looking forward to sitting down and re-watching the presentation. I'm curious to see if it looked like I knew what I was talking about, or if I looked lost. I wish I had known what an Edu assay worked in my Q&A session, but other than that, I feel like I knew the story of my paper.

If I could do it again, I would still start prepping a week in advance. I would probably go to more office hours, because it would have helped to decipher the paper with our instructors. I can't say what I would do during the presentation, because it really did happen in a blur.