My experience doing my first scientific presentation

by Tiwa Aina

Preparing for my journal club presentation had three main parts: reading the paper in all of its denseness, understanding the researchers' results and their significance, and distilling this knowledge into a digestible form.

Cutting through the jargon was really difficult, especially when the authors insisted on using terminology that an “intelligent but uninitiated” reader would not be acquainted with. For instance, in X, the paper I presented, they mentioned that used the SpyTag/SpyCatcher system to couple the VLP and the CIDRα1 protein. Then, they repeatedly gave measurements for catCIDRα1 and the CIDRα1cat. This was incomprehensible to me and caused me to read entire sections of the paper over and over until I came to a realization: a peptide can be attached from both sides, and the “cat” meant that the VLP held the “Catcher” side of the SpyCatcher system. This was critical information that needed to be clear to the reader for her to understand the results, and so I made sure to stress it during my own presentation.

In terms of presentation delivery, the most surprising thing was frankly that I must have been engaging enough for people to have had insights and comments about the subject matter! For example, I commented that it wasn’t very interesting to me that there was a correlation between the intensity of the IgG response and inhibitory capacity, because I imagined that by the pigeonhole principle, we should see positive correlation. Dr. Niles was able to further comment on how the distribution of immunoglobulins isn’t completely random, which meant to me that my discussion of the content was clear and inviting discourse.

The recording practice we did was very useful for building presentation confidence, even though it wasn't live. I think the knowledge that people would be trying to understand and internalize the words I said made me much more conscious about my delivery. I've always had a problem with "umm"ing; for the aforementioned reasons I really wanted to minimize my distracting filler words. When I prepared, I made sure to pause instead of "umm"ing--even at the cost of wasting time--and the fact that I had so much to share in only 10 minutes seems to have forced my subconscious to pre-articulate what I wanted to communicate (lest I waste half a minute pausing). As far as filler words go, I don't know how well it went when I had to present for real, but I hope my practice paid off!

The journal club presentation was a really fun assignment to work on. I really loved the opportunity to read real, recent, relevant research. Perhaps even more so, I liked the chance to practice and improve on my oral presentation skills, since effective oral communication is really important to me (and important for the quick/casual sharing of scientific results)!

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