Practice, Practice, Practice

Public speaking has always been something I struggle with, despite my gradual progression to a social extrovert over the years, so when I heard that the Journal Club Presentation is one of the major assignments for Mod 2 (and that it was worth a whopping 15% of my grade!), I couldn't help but balk a little.

Reading scientific papers has always been an intimidating task for me. They always seem too dense, too confusing, or too try-hard, resulting in a very confused Nathan as he tries to decipher said scientific papers. However, being forced to actually sit down and decipher the paper I chose ended up being not nearly as daunting a task as I thought it would be (though it did cost me the latter half of my Spring Break). Some of the figures were either unnecessarily complicated or overburdened with data, and the author's point about PR-DUB only took me an hour of staring to understand, but overall, I think I got the general grasp of my paper, which is good.. pretty sure.

Now the actual presentation part was uh... more questionable. I just hope I did well in the end, and if nothing else, I definitely did learn from this experience! I learned that I shouldn't worry over presenting so much. Even if I don't feel like I'm an expert on the topic I'm presenting, my audience won't know that and all that is expected of me is to do my best and educate my colleagues accordingly. I learned that everyone presents their papers in different ways, and that's okay. You get to see the story they decide to pull from the paper, and it's totally fine if different people have different interpretations of the same paper's goal. It's all an ongoing learning process, basically.


~Nathan Liang

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