Public Speaking Yikes

Public speaking has never been my strong suit, so giving a presentation in front of my classmates made me pretty anxious.

Initially when I looked at my paper, the figures and the take away message seemed pretty straight forward. I thought that explaining the meaning and significance of these figures couldn’t possibly take up the entire 10 mins. However, as I prepared my slides it became clear that there was more vastly more information than available space in the slides. One difficult choice that was caused by this lack of space, was determining which figures best showed the take away message. Additionally, I was surprised by how much detail I wanted to include in the introduction, despite the fact that we were recommended to spend only 2 minutes on that sections.


Overall I felt that I could have improved my selection of figures chosen to represent the take away message. Furthermore, I should have spent more time making sure I addressed every part of the figure instead of trying to make sure I showed the class every figure within the 10 minutes. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading the paper I presented, and enjoyed the other presentations my classmate gave.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gearing up for grad school

As I walked out of the classroom after the Mod3 research proposal presentation I felt a massive sense of relief and pride. The last major assignment of 20.109 was over – I had done it! The road had been far from smooth – the mod2 report had been a towering mountain that I still can’t believe I was able to scale. The mod3 presentation had been an intimidating concept – it was definitely overwhelming at first to have to narrow down literally all of biology and select a single topic of interest. However, once my group and I had an idea we were able to have a great time discussing and fleshing out the concept. Do I think it was the greatest idea for a research project ever? Probably not, but I think it was much better than I could have come up with before starting 109. Although it was hard to find enough time to dedicate to the proposal and to sleep with a busy final week for all my classes, I’m proud of myself and my team for the work that we put in and the resulting p...
Read more

It BE like that sometimes (R)

Image
The hardest part of scientific writing for me is a combination of a lot of different things. Finding the reason for the research that is not too broad (aka, cancer in general), but is also not too specific (glioblastoma, since, while our cells were from glioblastoma, we didn’t directly study this). The implications and future-works section was rough for similar reasons to the background and motivation, but it was slightly easier since it was based off of our own data. Also, compiling information to include in the background and motivation is really rough. I think making the figures and analysis was a little easier, though it was definitely very time consuming. It be like that sometimes I guess. I did enjoy making the figures in MATLAB though! Was a lot of fun for me. Something that really helped our team was making a to-do list of everything that needed to get done. I think this is something I will implement for writing my full research report for Module 2....
Read more

Great way to end the semester

I wasn’t quite sure how much to trust the teaching staff when they said our class was going to get a lot better after the research article, but it actually did. This final module was a lot of fun. As an undergrad, most of my experience with science comes from going to classes in large lecture halls or performing the same experiment over and over again for my UROP supervisor. Coming up with a novel bioengineering idea from scratch was very different from most class assignments and helped remind me why I chose this major in the first place (definitely a necessary reminder while struggling through 20.320 and questioning my life choices). The research proposal was still a lot of work, but the work involved reading research articles about a topic I was interested in and brainstorming with my lab partner. 20.109 has been a really wonderful class (probably my favorite technical class I’ve taken at MIT). The instructors and TAs were amazing, and I think that the things I lear...
Read more