Zoom Journal Club

When I first envisioned writing this blog post, I thought I would have completed my journal club presentation and would talk about how it went and how I dealt with being nervous about presenting.  But, as you all know, instead of presenting to our class I presented to a computer screen.  Becky was right, it feels weird teaching to a screen.  The first time I ran through it I mispronounced a word on the first slide.  No big deal, I just stopped the recording and started over.  However, as I kept practicing I would get further and further before mispronouncing a word or awkwardly phrasing a sentence and having to entirely start over.

Going into the presentation, I assumed it should be perfect because it's a recording and we have endless time to get it right.  However, after redoing the same presentation more times than I can count, I realized that it may be near impossible to truly execute it perfectly - and that's ok (I hope!).  It is unrealistic to expect a presentation to ever be word for word the way you drew it up.  Coming to that realization marked a turning point in the experience for me.  Afterwards I treated it more like a live presentation, working through small mistakes rather than starting over.  I think the process of learning to roll with the punches when presenting is an important piece of the puzzle.  For some people, myself included, it will always be a bit stressful so mistakes will happen.  That's not the end of the world and we shouldn't feel like the whole presentation is ruined if they do.  Being able to present, in journal clubs or otherwise, is something that we will likely all encounter so in the long run I'm sure I will appreciate the experience I got in this class.

I hope you are all doing well at home!  I miss seeing everyone!!

-Karenna

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