Breathing helps!

Conquering stage fright.

This prompt was correct, this was my first time formally presenting research published by someone else but even more, it was probably my first time in college presenting in a course 20 class! I've only been doing HASS presentations since I have been at MIT. The most surprising part about preparing this presentation must have been that I could pick and choose what figures I presented and that had a huge impact on the presentation. I omitted some things from my journal club article that would not have really helped my explanation. Not only would they not have helped, but I also realized that the researchers were making some... interesting choices (they did some experiments on one buffer and then optimized it just to use another and it was weird). There were also a lot of supplemental figures of which some were totally useless and others were way better than the ones they actually used as figures in the paper. 

Of course the thing I feared most was presenting! I was nervous but tried to tell myself it was a small audience and imagined that I was just explaining my paper to a few students at a time, which seemed much more doable. I was only nervous of presenting, not because I didn't understand the paper. Furthermore, I began getting jittery and caught myself and tried breathing deeply and slowly. This did seem to help calm most of the nerves. 

For the future, I will definitely keep the breathing in mind and make sure I know my material as well as I did this time to make things easier. 


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