Journal Club Reflection

At first, I was super concerned about the journal club assignment-- it was 15% of the course grade, and it was like ten minutes!!! What if I forgot everything, or if powerpoint deleted my slides the night before, or I completely misunderstood the paper? However, since I was worried, I decided to start really early. I read the paper during downtime in lab, and starting working on the slides as soon as I could. After about a week of tuning the slides and what I planned to say, I felt prepared. I asked a friend to function as an audience, and practiced twice, realizing that I needed to add more visual cues to the powerpoint-- it was really confusing on a busy slide what I was talking about. After this round of practice, I further refined my slides. I was able to fit another practice on Monday night with Fidelia and Athena, which really helped as well. In general, I never remember how presentations actually end up going because I get too focused on not talking too fast or clicking the wrong button on powerpoint that I don't really end up noticing anything else. In that sense, I'm morbidly curious to see how the recording looks-- I'm also mortified to hear my own voice though.

In general, I think this semester, and particularly this class. is really a good balance of different types of work, which really helps with managing time. Hopefully, I can continue to start things early so I actually have time to address what I can learn from an assignment. I'm trying to do that with the Research Article assignment too, and hopefully it works out.

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