What's important?

I've always been the kind of person who goes way past the word limit on an essay or way past the time limit on a presentation. I always want to make sure that my audience gets every piece of information they could possibly need to understand the message I'm trying to deliver. 

Realistically, this isn't possible, so we're forced to deliver only as much information as is necessary to understand the overall message. This feels strange to me, so creating presentations is always a bit difficult for me. This journal club presentation was no exception.  Every time I removed a piece of information from my presentation, I worried that I might have removed information necessary to understand my overall message.

When I first prepared my presentation, it was 20 minutes long. I deleted slides, one at a time, checking the length of my presentation each time. 18 minutes, 16 minutes, 13 minutes... finally, after deleting or condensing about 7 slides, I made it to 10 minutes. I felt unsatisfied... like I was leaving out information that would help my audience get a better understanding of the paper. 

However, after practicing my presentation in front of a few friends, I realized that my presentation had enough information. It just felt wrong to me because I had read the rest of the journal article and wanted to share all the background information that had helped me develop a deeper understanding of the study.

I guess its just something that gets easier with practice. I understand that trimming down presentations to the essential information is an important skill, and now I know that although it's difficult, I can do it. The good thing is at MIT, we have to be able to present research, so we'll have plenty of opportunities to practice. 

~ Divya Ravinder

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