Learning About PARP Inhibitors on a Boat

The weekend before spring break I found myself in an unusual predicament. I had to read my paper that week if there was any hope of me completing my presentation on time. The only problem was that I was about to leave on a boat for the whole week with absolutely no internet or cell service of any kind.

Now, the naïve reader might think that this is no big deal. I should just print out the paper in advance and read it on the boat. Wrong. These papers are riddled with jargon. For example, my paper was entitled “Synthetic Lethality of PARP Inhibitors in Combination with MYC Blockade Is Independent of BRCA Status in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer” and I had to look up “Synthetic lethality”, “PARP inhibitors”, “MYC blockade”, and “Triple-negative breast cancer” before I could even understand just the title.

What was I going to do? There was no way I was going to understand the paper without looking some stuff up, but I absolutely needed to understand the paper.

That’s when I decided to make the big cheat sheet. Before I left, I skimmed through the whole paper for words I didn’t understand, and I copied and pasted the Wikipedia article definitions and key information for all of them. As a result, I didn’t just bring my 14 page, super-dense, information packed paper on the trip, but I also brought a 16 page, single-spaced, times new roman document full of definitions to understand. I was dreading reading the paper.

At first, I thought not being able to access the internet to gain more information to understand my paper was going to be a huge detriment to my understanding. But, actually, I think it was really a blessing. Since I compiled the definitions without actually reading the paper, it forced me to understand a bunch of background information about every little detail of the paper. As a result, I was really confident about answering questions.

Overall, the presentation was a good learning experience, especially when it comes to making effective slides. Cutting down the information to just the essentials was super important. It was also no easy task when some of the figures have panels A through R. The key to making the presentation effective, I found, was really having a strong understanding of the material of the paper even before selecting the data to show, and I think creating a list of definitions, though time consuming, is actually beneficial.


I’m also really glad that the presentation’s over. Now time for the research article! Also, have some memes.

-Domenic


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