Part of the 73%

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 73% of US adults are estimated to have a fear of public speaking. Every time I get up to speak in front of a group I am reminded that I am part of the 73%. 

I really like designing the visual aesthetic for figures and schematics so that was definitely my favorite part of preparing for this assignment. I was most surprised by how easy my paper was to understand. I'm not sure if that's because it was just a straightforward paper or if I'm getting better at reading scientific articles.  

I was expecting that including figures from the paper in my presentation would be easy but I had to ]remake some of my figures because they were so low resolution! You'd think if you went through the trouble of producing high-quality data you'd be bothered to make it look nice. I tried my best to replicate their graphs and make them more visually engaging. I was surprised and thankful of the fact that I didn't have too much trouble pacing myself through my presentation. This was pretty crucial since we had such a small margin of error. 

My favorite tool to calm my nerves for a presentation is to wear funky socks. I wore a green sock with some chemical structures on it and a blue sock with DNA on it. When I presented some research at the BMES conference in Atlanta I wore my narwhal socks so whenever I got nervous I could just remember that I was giving this important presentation and no one knew I had narwhals on my socks. It makes the whole process feel a lot less high-stakes :)

Overall it was a pretty enjoyable experience to hear everyone present these different papers and actually understand the implications of the information they discussed and be able to ask productive questions.

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