I’m definitely
not the person to look ahead at future assignments. I have enough on my mind as is, so why worry myself with an assignment weeks away? So, imagine my surprise
to find out that we had some sort of journal club nonsense awaiting us toward
the end of Mod 2.
…yay?
Now, I’m going to be honest about how I feel about public
speaking. If you were to give me a choice between public speaking and sticking
my tongue on a pole in the winter, well, it doesn’t hurt that much to yank your tongue from a frozen pole—trust me, I know. However,
I decided to remain optimistic, or else I’d just end up upset about the
necessity of giving this ten minute ‘talk’ about some random article.
When we got the opportunity to choose our article and day
of presentation, you better believe that I chose the last day possible. That’s
not to say that I was going to put it off for as long as I could (or at least
it wasn’t my intention to, more on that later), but I wanted to be able to have
adequate time and examples in the other presenters that were presenting on M2D5.
In choosing the article, I knew right away that I wanted the
CRISPR-Cas/HIV-1 article. I have some background knowledge regarding about both
topics, so I thought it would be a perfect choice. So why not?
After some instruction on what Journal Club presentations
entailed, I actually didn’t feel too discouraged. It honestly didn’t seem that
bad. Even when the five or six fellow 20.109-ers presented on M2D5, I still
felt that Journal Club wouldn’t be too terrible. And for once, I can proudly say
that I was right to feel that way. It really wasn’t one of Dante’s nine
circles of Hell I initially thought it might be.
Okay, confession time. I didn’t start my presentation until
the Sunday before M2D8. Now, now, don’t shoot. It was only partially due to procrastination. Let me explain. I’ll admit that I
could have at the very least read my article the week of the first round of Journal
Club presentations. That’s on me. However, there was no way that I was going to
do work over spring break. This may sound ridiculous to some people *cough* 7.05 *cough*, but I make it a
point to not do school work over a “break.” It’s called spring break for crying out loud, not spring “do class work” week! But I digress. This
left me with a week and a half to get the Journal club presentation done, but with
my 7.05 exam, 20.109 homework, and CPW around the corner, I really only had the
three days before the presentation to prepare.
That’s my excuse. It’s a pretty
good if you ask me.
For some odd reason, I actually understood the article I
chose to present on. What a great start to my Journal Club presentation! Over
the following two days, I got my PowerPoint slides and notes ready. The only problem was that I
didn’t have time to practice until half an hour before Lab. This was probably
the most stressing moment. I had been running on three hours of sleep a day
since Sunday, and I didn’t give myself adequate time to practice speaking.
Whelp.
I just want to say sorry to the two people (Vivian and
Hunter) who went before me because it was tough to pay attention while
agonizing over my presentation.
When it was my turn to go, I went from super anxious and
nervous to calm in the blink of an eye. That’s usually how I operate. The build
up to the presentation is ALWAYS worse than actually presenting (excluding the
Q&A portion). I do believe that I accidentally went two minutes over the
allotted time, but I felt really good about my presentation.
Now came time for
the Q&A portion, also known as the bane of my existence (I know, I’m quite the dramatic human). At this point, I just winged everything. Honestly, there was
nothing going on in my brain at that point.
Then it was over.
All in all, the worst part was probably asking questions.
Man, I hate participation. Especially when I don’t know what’s going on. But
that’s for another time.
Journal Club wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. No
matter how I was ‘scored’, I am proud of how I composed myself.
All that's left now for Mod 2 is the research article...
Gosh, I’m not looking forward to that.
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