NP Presentations

    It's very easy to verify that a presentation was good. Making a good presentation on the other hand, is much much harder. Personally, I'm a very closed person, and I prefer to hide behind mounds of data, figures, and statistics as opposed to trimming it down to a digestible pill that the audience can ingest. Moreover, this process of trimming necessarily loses some information, and finding the cutoff boundary between excessive data and insufficient detail is both subjective and highly variable over the audience and the data itself. 

    The journal club presentation in particular presented additional challenges. Not only was the presentation under a strict time limit, but the presentation itself was on research that I hadn't done, or really even considered prior to the project. Trimming one's own data is hard enough, but lopping off large sections of what an author clearly felt was important enough to include in their publication? It's really easy to feel like every part of the story in a research article is a necessary component of it, and the truth is that in fact every part is integral to the story. The real question is how to superimpose your own story over the author's story, while still remaining faithful to the principles undergirding the actual data itself. That superimposition is what the audience sees, and that's what I struggle with.

    So how did I fix this? Well, the truth is I probably haven't. Not completely at least. Usually my tactics for a presentation involve leaving plenty of crutches all over my slides, lest I wind away on a tangent, and generally providing as much detail as I can on the slides for wandering audiences. In truth, this is probably a presentation that I personally would enjoy, since it offers me the ability to read and interpret the data at my own pace rather than at the pace of the speaker. However, that's not the right way to communicate with the majority of people, who look to the speaker, not the presentation, as the Single Source of Truth. 

    And now we come to why the journal club presentation is a useful marker of strengths and weaknesses in presentation skills. It's all well and good to discuss research and/or work that you as the original source can pull endless details about; it's another thing to recall work done by somebody else, and present that to a fresh audience who may or may not know all of the details surrounding the work that was done, and who can therefore ask questions that completely disarm you. It's this change of ownership that highlights flaws and areas in need of work in presentation skills, that can't be covered up by simply adding relevant details pulled out of a hat. It needs an understanding of the underlying source material to at least twice or thrice the extent that's intended to be presented to the audience, while also maintaining the perspective of the audience hearing this for the first time. It's these types of presentations that actually develop soft skills, and that's why even though I struggled with this assignment, I have hope that it's going to b better in the future.

-- Prem

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