Spring (break????)

When I first bought plane tickets for spring break last semester, I was picturing a lovely trip to Europe involving castles, museums, and no work at all. Then, when 20.109 began and I saw the due date for the journal club presentation, I started to picture spring break as a miserable week of castles, museums, and tons of work.

However, once spring break began, I realized that I am fairly good at doing work while on public transportation, airplanes, etc.

The actual assignment itself really was not bad once I got over the fact that I would have to do some work over spring break. I thoroughly enjoyed reading my paper and learning about research that is relevant to what we are learning in lab. I think one of the most difficult parts of the assignment was determining which information to include. Ten minutes is not a long time to teach a brand new concept and introduce a lot of significant research in.

One of the most surprising parts of the presentation was that a lot of other 109ers had similar topics, so on Tuesday after the first round of presentations, I had to adjust my presentation slightly as to not repeat the background information about PARP inhibitors for the fifth time.

I was also fairly nervous for the actual presentation itself, because I have not presented scientific research before. I was especially nervous about the question and answer session at the end, as I had seen Leslie ask a few very difficult questions on Tuesday. However, I was relieved to find that most of the questions my classmates asked were questions that I had thought about when reading the paper, and had thus looked into and prepared answers for.

Most importantly, the presentations were not as bad as expected due to the supporting nature of my 109 classmates! After each presentation, almost everybody in the class congratulated one another on finally finishing Journal Club.

Overall, I think Journal Club was a very interesting project, and I really enjoyed learning more about my topic as well as all of the other presentations. I look forward to using my new journal club skills sometime in the future!

-Abby McGee

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