Journal Clubs: Less Time, More Impact

I enjoyed 20.109 journal club more than I expected, both in presenting my own paper and in seeing classmates' presentations. I've participated in a few journal clubs before in my lab, but the presentations from 20.109 as a whole seemed more coherent and engaging. In the past when I've presented for journal club, I've usually found myself copying figures from the paper into a slideshow and simply talking through all the figures. The result has usually been a lengthy presentation of data that might give listeners a good understanding of the content of the paper, but forces listeners to distill a takeaway for themselves. In approaching the 20.109 journal club presentation, the strict 10 minute time limit forced me to be more intentional about deciding on a main message for the presentation and adhering strictly to that message, even if that message was slightly different from the paper's overall message. Limiting the scope of the presentation made it much more concise and effective than presentations I've given in the past. I appreciated this intentionality in classmates' presentations as well, and it made me really enjoy their presentations and feel like I learned a lot.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

109 has... taken over

Image
SOoo... Journal Club presentations have finally ended and a time of "rest" has come. I'm not really sure how to make this a deep, enlightening post so I'm just going state what happened (in a clear and concise way) and hope that the meaning comes out on its own. Inconclusive Data on the Effect of Practice on Stress Reduction and Journal Club Presentation Time  Introduction Every biological engineer at MIT is required to take 20.109. Students are required to complete six major communication assignments, three of which are verbal assignments. It's of particular importance that one understand the process of developing a Journal Club presentation to prevent the pain and failure of future 109ers. Methods Journal Club Prepared Using Blood Sweat and Tears The paper "CRISPR-Cas9-based mutagenesis frequently provokes on-target mRNA misregulation" (WHATSTHIS) was analyzed using my brain to procure meaningful figures that would later be pre...
Read more

Working in a team!

I have enjoyed learning everything in Mod 1, especially the public health aspects of our research. It was exciting that we had a real research question and actually tried to find the answer rather than purely learning wet lab techniques! This was a huge surprise, as I came in thinking we would just repeat some boring experiments that people have done before. I was very excited going into lab. I was shocked, however, by how small our section was. I was even more surprised when I was told that the first data summary was going to be done with my partners. My past experiences of working in a team were horrible. Everyone was behind, and I always ended up having to clean up the mess. However, working with my group in 20.109 totally changed my opinion! From working together in lab to writing the data summary, my partners really have helped me learn. Reflecting back, I think that the data summary assignment would have been so much more difficult if I had to do it alone. As none of ...
Read more

Break it up into pieces

Just finished the Mod 2 Research Article! It was a really long assignment that took a while to complete, but I think I really started appreciating the homework we did along the way when I realized that we had basically already written the Introduction and Methods sections. I then started putting together the figures, and tried to split up the writing into small tasks (ie Results section for sequencing figure) to make it more manageable. Additionally, the teaching staff were very helpful and responsive to all my questions. After putting together a draft, I then read through it once myself and made edits to it, and scheduled an appointment with the CommLab for Monday morning. The grad student I met with this time was extremely helpful; he was able to pinpoint very clearly areas of my article that needed clarification, or were too wordy and needed to be cut down. Following his feedback, I revised my article again, and gave it a few more read throughs before submitting. I definitely think...
Read more