Journal Club: ✓

Public speaking has never been my strong suit. Even after numerous presentation experiences, I still get antsy thinking about talking in front of a large crowd and worry about things going terribly wrong. I think the best advice given by the Com Lab, though, was to just envision your talk going well. I tried to keep that in mind and head into the talk with a positive mindset, and it helped! As soon as I got in front of the room and started talking, I immediately relaxed and began to enjoy the experience of sharing some cool science with my peers.

 Something difficult about the experience was trying to define the scope of what I would share and what I should know. A lot of the paper presented new material, I wasn’t sure how much background reading I should be doing. We were supposed to present one paper, but reading about that one paper didn’t provide us with the necessary background information to understand and explain its every intricacy. I ended up having to do a lot more research to understand the background literature sufficiently, making this whole assignment a better learning experience. Choosing how much of the paper to include in the talk was also difficult. There were many cool experiments that I had to leave out in order to keep the talk concise and deliver the main message only. Learning to do so definitely helped me maximize the signal to noise ratio and improve my talk!

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