Quantity of Information vs Quality of Understanding

When the Journal Club Assignment was first mentioned in class, I was excited because I love teaching. This was a chance for me to teach my audience about an interesting paper - that's how I framed it in my mind, and it did make the assignment easier. However, in order to teach something, one must know it very well. And to me, that was the most difficult part.

Scientific papers are never easy to read, and I find the best way to digest all the information is to take notes and sketch flow diagrams while reading. It’s very easy to lose track of the function of a certain protein, or how it relates to the other components of a pathway, especially if 20 other proteins are involved. But I was set on understanding the paper thoroughly, and this meant extensive note-taking. I ended up reading a lot about assays that were used in the paper to understand how they worked. I also discovered that the more you understand your paper, the more interesting it gets. Ultimately, the schematics I drew to understand the material helped me put together the diagrams in my presentation. Since I'd arranged the material in a way that helped me understand it best, I figured it would achieve the same for the audience.

While designing my slides, I thought a lot about how to best organize my talk so that the audience would digest the information without getting lost. I used a very minimalist approach to my slides. And rather than trying to cover as much material as possible within the time limit, I remembered to “tell a story”, and focused on explaining the most important points in depth. I also tried to reiterate the key findings. To do this, I used a “home slide” that I kept returning to. After explaining a key finding, I added it to mechanism shown on the home-slide and therefore, gradually built up the mechanism over time. I thought this would be helpful for the audience to remember the pathways.

             I wonder, however, if I should have tried to cover a few more points in my presentation. At the expense of driving the points home, did I oversimplify the content? I hope at the very least that the presentation was clear and easy to follow.