Memes + realizing that reading journal articles isn't as bad as I thought


"How in the world am I supposed to explain a whole journal article to the class!?"

"What if I don't even understand it myself?

 I'm gonna look so dumb, ahh!"

These were a few of my thoughts when I learned we had to do a journal club presentation for 20.109. I have read a decent number of journal articles for UROPs, but I have rarely felt confident in my ability to fully grasp all the concepts. I often get overwhelmed reading journals and trying to interpret figures, and I feel like even when I set out extra time to read an article, I still miss important details. For my UROP, though, I've only had to discuss the papers with my mentor, and she always answers any questions and provides a better explanation if I didn't fully understand things, but now, I would be expected to do all the explaining for others.



I was really proud of myself when I actually read my article all the way through about 2 weeks before the assignment was even due. However, I'm not sure how much that actually helped considering my time in between my 1st and 2nd readings of the article was consumed by my data summary revision, coding exercises in R, and plenty of other assignments.

When I reread the article, I think I finally started to see the concept  of "telling a story" in the article. I read everything kind of slowly and took notes along the way to help myself understand the flow of information. I actually felt like I was understanding the researchers' current problem, their proposed solution, their experimental methods , and conclusions drawn from their work. (In fact, I had previously done an experiment that was similar to one the researchers used!) Suddenly, the task of presenting on this article did not seem so daunting.

Well, actually it was still daunting (just slightly less daunting than before) considering I still had to piece together my own presentation of the article (choose figures, edit, put just the right amount of text on powerpoint slides) and then explain it for 10 minutes to a computer screen. 



After this assignment, I'm more confident in my ability to comprehend a journal article and connect the figures to the experiments in the text. I also learned just how important it is to practice a presentation - even if this wasn't in-person, I still had to be able to speak coherently and sound like I knew what I was talking about (which was definitely not the case when I first practiced running through my slides). I'm sure my presentation wasn't flawless, but I do feel like I gained a lot from the assignment.

(note: I'm not the most fluent in meme, but I decided to try to be bit more creative with this blog)

Below, is what I hope to accomplish some day :)

-Anais



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