Ten Minutes is Really Short


I don’t really mind public speaking, but journal club was still plenty challenging. I had the hardest time streamlining my information, but I got a lot of practice speaking and learned a lot for the journal article.

The hardest thing for me was the sheer amount of content in my article. My article had seven figures with about 16 panels each as well as supplementary figures that also were not trivial. Their process involved many repeated experiments to verify pathways and make sure there weren’t off target effects. But I felt like I was not giving the authors credit by not talking about every study. I really had to learn how to tell the story in the best way possible.

The first thing was it took me forever to read the article the first time. It was break so I would read like a page at a time while lounging around and looking at Facebook. It definitely was not efficient and I kept having to refresh my memory so I would sit down and read it in one go next time.

They next part was parsing out the story. In my article, words did not correspond to importance. They spend so much time verifying the MYC pathway which only became one or two slides in my paper. And they did many other experiments with patient samples and in other cell lines that I didn’t include in the end.

I then had to cut my presentation extensively. I couldn’t show cool things like the excised tumor burden or future works experiments. But I really found out how much information was essential. And working through my talk make me think about efficient explanations of figures and methods so it would go faster next time. (SO to Kristen and Andrea for practicing with me)

Actually presenting was a little nerve-wracking especially going last I couldn’t fully focus on the other presentations. But once I started talking I felt prepared and like I knew what was going on in each slide so even if I forgot what I was going to say I could get through it. And I made it in ten minutes which was a big accomplishment for me.

With all of the problems I noticed and dealt with in my paper, I think I have a lot of knowledge of how to write the mod2 paper. With an emphasis on concision and logical order to give the reader the best experience.  

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