The journey to journal club

Preparing for journal club was a lot more work than I originally expected. Presentations don't make me terribly nervous, so my biggest concern for journal club was making sure I had all of my slides prepared in time. I started reading the paper the weekend before I was going to present and spent the better part of Sunday reading and reading some sections to unravel the point the researchers were trying to make. I got my slides done and with only a couple questions believed I was in great shape. But then I went to Office Hours and basically the first thing Noreen said to me was "Have you practiced this yet?" Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wellllllll no..... Yikes that would have been a good thing to do early on for a 10 min. presentation in front of my section and ALL the teaching faculty..... Shout out to Noreen for being really good at knowing that the slides I had prepared would take too long to go through under the time limit. The week before spring break was incredibly busy so I didn't have time to practice my presentation out loud until the night before. Thankfully, I had all my notes ready to go and had understood the information thoroughly while preparing my slides. Even then, it added a lot of stress to only practice a couple of times before the day of the presentation. So here's another shout out to Josh for having the BRILLIANT idea of practicing our presentations for each other right before class. When I practiced alone I had always been right on the border of going to long so I thought with nerves I would be right on time. Well not quite. As I presented to Josh it suddenly hit me that I was starting slide 6 of 8 after talking for only 6 minutes!!!!! Internally I started freaking out but I managed to stretch out my last couple of slides and go into detail on what had been studied to get my presentation to 9:30. Thankfully, this happened during the practice run because then I knew when I was presenting to stretch out the beginning of my talk a little bit so that I wouldn't have to overdo the discussion of my last slides. Ultimately, my presentation went well and the timing was great but if it hadn't been for Noreen and Josh I would have been a disaster. So the takeaway from Journal Club for me is that just knowing the material really well isn't quite enough for a great presentation. The next time I am presenting I will be sure to practice presenting in front of my peers before the day of the event.