Journal Club


Having just completed our journal club presentations, I must say, I feel very relieved 😊! It was definitely a struggle for me at all steps, so I’m just going to share the process I went through here:

1.      Reading the paper & looking up vocabulary
a.      Feeling very confused as to why every two sentences seems to be discussing some new experiment with references to figures, extended data, and supplementary figures?
b.      Puzzled by where there is no discussion section to help me understand the data/figures?
c.       Overall, just don’t know what they’re talking about
2.      Re-reading the paper  
a.      realizing that this is a letter (my first time reading a letter!), hence the odd format
b.      understanding the paper a bit better, but still overwhelmed by all the experiments done and not really getting their thinking process
c.       It was also really hard needing to flip back and forth between the text itself and the pages and pages of extended data figures and supplementary figures they referenced
d.      At this point, I realized that I needed to make some kind of outline of the paper to keep track of everything, and see the logical flow & thinking process
3.      Re-reading the paper while taking notes
a.      Things are starting to make a bit more sense
b.      I had to try to kind of interpret and figure out what the figures meant, because they only gave really short (~ 1 sentence) explanations
c.       I realized my notes were many, many pages long à definitely too much to put into a journal club presentation
4.      Re-reading + condensing my notes into an outline for the journal club
a.      It was really tough trying to figure out which things to cut out and which to leave in
b.      However, this process was really helpful in that I was able to understand the logical flow behind the paper a lot better
5.      Making Journal club slides
a.      During the process of making the slides according to my outline, I thought about how switching the order of some of the slides and editing them would make for a more logical flow. So there was a lot of back and forth editing as I deliberated what the best way to present the data and “story” would be.
b.      Took forever, but it was a much easier process now that I had the outline done
c.       The Comm Lab presentations were really helpful, as I was able to put what we learned about editing figures from the Comm Lab into practice
6.      Doing the actual presentation
a.      I often get really nervous doing presentations, and this was still kind of the case even though I was just doing it at home on Zoom
b.      It took me a couple of tries to get through the whole thing without any terrible mistakes
c.       I also realized that I still didn’t cut out enough of the experiments. If I did that, I probably could have spent more time explaining each figure, and the presentation would have been better. But at this point, I didn’t really have enough time to rethink how I could present the logical flow of the experiments with fewer experiments and redo the presentation…so I just had to settle ☹.

Even though I wasn’t happy with my final product, I think I definitely learned a lot from this experience! I learned about the content of the article, the process of really digesting and thinking about how to present information, and about myself as a presenter. Hopefully, I can take this experience and use it to improve for next time!

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