Preparing for a Presentation
I've always found reading papers to be fun, but I'm a bit of an introvert, so talking about them in front of large groups has always been difficult. This time around, the paper wasn't actually too difficult to process. It mainly relied on RNA-seq and enrichment analysis, which we'd talked about in class and in lab. It was some pathways and a few assays at the start that required a bit more research to interpret, but that was mostly finished the weekend before presentations. The hard parts were trying to fit the talk into 10 minutes and practicing the talk itself.
10 minutes is a surprisingly short amount of time, and there's always more to potentially discuss (e.g. background information about the purpose/pathways, or the theory behind certain experiments/assays). You have to judge what the audience already knows and what they might need a refresher on; for me, I'd assumed that the students and staff were already familiar with RNA-seq, enrichment analysis, and qRT-PCR from class, but may need to know more about cell cycle assays and apoptosis assays. There's also a question of how to present background information; in my case, I put the intro to those assays during their results slides, instead of talking about them at the start. On the other side, there's also the question of what things are okay to leave out (e.g. the MAP kinase cascade is a long pathway, but the audience only needs to know a few parts of it to understand the talk I was giving). Even with all these considerations, I ended up going over the 10:30 limit by 30 seconds, so in retrospect I should have cut out more of the talk.
Another major difficulty for me was practicing it. I originally tried to use notecards at first to jot down major points, but the more I practiced, the less I ended up using them for talking points, and the more I used them for jotting down information that might come up in questions, or auxiliary info about assays. It's also hard to mimic the environment you're presenting in. During past presentations, I've often gotten nervous midway and stumbled over my words, or blanked out trying to remember what I was about to say. These kinds of problems wouldn't come up during practice, but would sometimes come up during the actual run, which makes them hard to correct. Personally, I've tried to fix these problems by presenting when there's someone else in the room with me, or even better to have multiple people in the room, but if they're your friends you might already be comfortable around them, which works against you. It's better if you can find some strangers who would be okay with it; perhaps it would work well to practice with a BE Comms Lab Fellow (I'll have to try this for the Mod 3 Presentations).
- Sachin Shinde
10 minutes is a surprisingly short amount of time, and there's always more to potentially discuss (e.g. background information about the purpose/pathways, or the theory behind certain experiments/assays). You have to judge what the audience already knows and what they might need a refresher on; for me, I'd assumed that the students and staff were already familiar with RNA-seq, enrichment analysis, and qRT-PCR from class, but may need to know more about cell cycle assays and apoptosis assays. There's also a question of how to present background information; in my case, I put the intro to those assays during their results slides, instead of talking about them at the start. On the other side, there's also the question of what things are okay to leave out (e.g. the MAP kinase cascade is a long pathway, but the audience only needs to know a few parts of it to understand the talk I was giving). Even with all these considerations, I ended up going over the 10:30 limit by 30 seconds, so in retrospect I should have cut out more of the talk.
Another major difficulty for me was practicing it. I originally tried to use notecards at first to jot down major points, but the more I practiced, the less I ended up using them for talking points, and the more I used them for jotting down information that might come up in questions, or auxiliary info about assays. It's also hard to mimic the environment you're presenting in. During past presentations, I've often gotten nervous midway and stumbled over my words, or blanked out trying to remember what I was about to say. These kinds of problems wouldn't come up during practice, but would sometimes come up during the actual run, which makes them hard to correct. Personally, I've tried to fix these problems by presenting when there's someone else in the room with me, or even better to have multiple people in the room, but if they're your friends you might already be comfortable around them, which works against you. It's better if you can find some strangers who would be okay with it; perhaps it would work well to practice with a BE Comms Lab Fellow (I'll have to try this for the Mod 3 Presentations).
- Sachin Shinde
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