20.109 in Punta Cana

So, I took Sean's advice and brought my research article with me to Punta Cana. [pictured below tanning at the pool] As I sat by the water, roasting away, reading about cancer, probably getting skin cancer, I think I read the abstract four times before I actually understood what it meant.


I've been shadowing a neurosurgeon for the past few months, so I thought it would be fun to read a paper related to the brain. Unfortunately, "fun" was definitely not the right word. However, reading the paper (many, many times) and finishing my presentation was very rewarding at the end. 

First, I tried to read the paper all the way through. I set out three hours for myself and sat down with a cup of tea. An hour and a half in, I was still on the first set of figures. I felt so overwhelmed and didn't feel like I had a good any grasp of what was happening. So I decided to step back, take a break, and then just look at the figures to start. I used the figures to piece the story together, and after a few hours, I understood a lot more. This elucidation continued up until my presentation day, where I repeatedly read over certain sections and delved deeper into others.
Some parts of the paper were extremely frustrating. Many of the figures were from immunofluorescence, so I felt like I was squinting trying to decipher one color from the other. Classes like 20.109, 20.320 and seminar electives have made me very critical of papers. I was frustrated by the lack of explanation for error bars in one figure. I often had to flip back and forth from the figure to the text to the methods to clarify what the authors really meant. There was also a few painful typos, such as when cells "loose" expression for a certain gene.
Sorry.. I know it could happen to anyone! The paper did do a really good job of illustrating every step in their research, often in multiple formats. By the end, it was difficult to decide which figures to put in because there were so many that I thought were important. Again, I had to take BE Comm advice and not correlate "importance" with "time spent working on."
The final struggle was practicing my presentation until I could get the timing right. My roommates could probably both tell you about the KISS1 mechanism because they listened to me go through my slide deck over and over, stopping, restarting my stopwatch, and starting again. Ultimately, I got the timing down (I think ~10:15? that +/- 0.5 will save me) and really enjoyed presenting to the class!

I feel that through this process I learned how to read papers (non-linearly), isolate what is important in a paper, create readable slides, and communicate scientific research.

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