Things I learned from my Journal Club Presentation

The last time that I’ve presented was a year ago when I embarrassed myself in front of my
HASS class by stumbling over my words and saying things that didn’t make sense at all.
Presenting is one of my greatest weaknesses because I always get extremely nervous
whenever talking in front of people. Therefore, when April was slowly approaching and we
had to start preparing for the Journal Club presentation, I began to panic. I still couldn’t get
over the embarrassment from my last presentation, and so I kept putting the assignment
aside. Halfway through Spring break, I finally started working on my presentation.

Here, I encountered an obstacle. After finishing the paper and spending hours figuring out
what the results and figures mean, I couldn’t decide on what to put in my presentation slides.
I did not know how to formulate a coherent story that would tie up all the important results of
the study. After repeatedly creating and deleting slides, I finally decided to craft the story
around three main questions that the authors explored in their paper. (Here's a tip: Use the
Introduction and Discussion sections to help you craft your story since they contain the main
conclusions of the paper).

After finally finishing the slides however, instead of practicing, I set the slides aside because
I was still unable to face the failure from my last presentation. I didn’t start practicing until
two nights before my presentation date when I encountered my second problem. I realized
that my presentation exceeded 15 minutes when it was only supposed to be 10 minutes. I
had to cut down on my slides. However, like I learned in 9.00 - people don’t like to lose what
they already have - the process of deleting my work was a torture for me. While I was
trimming down the slides, I noticed that my story was falling apart. This meant that I had to
rewrite my presentation script and think of new transitions to connect one slide to another.
Realizing that there was still so much to do and only one day left before the presentation,
I regretted for delaying working on the presentation.

On the day of my presentation, I prayed that I would not go over 10 minutes. When it was
finally my time to present, I took a deep breath and told myself to just focus on the
information that I was about to present on. At the end, the presentation itself was not too
bad. However, I screwed up on the questions. I usually have a habit of answering questions
right away because I always thought that a delay in answering questions would make
people think that you do not have the answers to them. Thus, I did not give myself the time
to really think about what the question is asking. After my presentation, when I had the time
to think about what I was saying, I realized that I did not answer the question at all. At that
moment, I just wanted to find a hole and bury myself in it. I had once again embarrassed
myself.

From this experience, however, I learned that I should overcome my fear of presentation
earlier. I should not have delayed the preparations for the presentation just because I
couldn’t get over my previous embarrassment. Furthermore, I learned that it is okay to
take a moment to digest a question before answering. Also, it is better to tell someone
that you do not have the answer to the question and that you will get back to them, than
embarrassing yourself with an answer that does not answer the question. Anyhow, my
presentation is over. Currently, I am trying forget the embarrassment from this presentation.
Instead, I will try to remember only the things that I should improve on in order to not let
this failure drag down my future presentation performance again.

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