One Figure Worths a Thousand Words

The first time I learned about journal club is when I first looked at 20.109 syllabus. I was like “Wait, journal club? 10 minute-presentation? Individual??? Nooooooooo!” I didn’t have good experience with presentation. In the past, I was so afraid that I forgot what I supposed to say, so I tried to include as much text in the slide as well as memorize what I needed to say. The result usually me reading every single word in my slide without even looking at my audience. So when I learned in the lecture and then in Comm Lab presentation workshop that I was not supposed to put more than three bullet of texts in my slide, my first thought was “RIP, how can I figure out what to say in 10 minutes ???” 

This fear motivated me to read the paper again and again, google the method and reference papers and thought about how to create a single cohesive story for the paper. A small hope in me was that once I understood the paper, then when I looked at the figure, my brain would remind me the meaning of it and direct my mouth to say it out loud. And I was so surprise that it worked! I was able to just look at the figure and talked about it, no need of additional 20 lines of text in the slide or memorizing each word. There were still many moments in the middle of the presentation that I forgot what to say, but the figure was there to help me. I figured out once I really understood the paper and the meaning of each figure along with lots of practice presentations, a magical circuit with the figure as input and the words to say as output would appear in my brain.