Crying in the (journal) club


When I chose my paper for journal club, I chose it because I thought it sounded interesting and relevant to the research that I have been doing in my UROP, and I’m really glad that I chose the paper I did. I really enjoyed reading this paper, probably in part because I felt like I had enough background knowledge about CRISPR that I could read through the paper without having to look up too many things, and I was relatively familiar with mouse injection experiments from my UROP, so I felt like I was actually able to fully appreciate the findings of the paper. When I’ve read other papers in the past, I’ve often felt like I had to spend so much time googling every other word and trying to keep track of what I’m supposed to already know that I don’t get to appreciate the paper’s findings, so reading this paper was refreshing. I also liked having enough time to read the paper multiple times and being able to really figure out and fully understand the concepts that the authors talk about. As a result, I ended up wanting to cover way too many of the paper’s experiments and findings in journal club, which made the first few iterations of my presentation a complete mess. I definitely found the process of deciding what to include in my presentation a little tricky, especially because I felt that it was necessary to explain an assay that the authors used for almost all of their experiments, which meant that even less time was available to talk about the actual results that they obtained. Ten minutes is so much shorter than I thought. Overall, I really learned a lot about presenting from this project, and I hope that my presentation turned out okay.

Aside from reading the paper and structuring the presentation, something that I always find interesting about public speaking is that no matter how well I feel like I know the material I’m presenting, I’m still ridiculously nervous. I felt a little better about doing this journal club presentation because I had been able to practice my presentation a lot, and had read the paper I was presenting quite a few times and felt pretty comfortable with the material in it, but it was still nerve-wracking. I’m definitely hoping that I’ll get a little more used to presenting things in the future.



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