Replace “presentation” with “letter” and that title becomes a quote by the great Mark Twain (although it’s also been attributed to Blaise Pascal and Winston Churchill, depending on who you ask). This is more or less how I feel about writing and presenting: I always have so much to say. So when we were given the mini presentation assignment, my first thought was something along the lines of:
Regardless of my concerns about length, I wrote a script, learned all my key points, and set up my laptop in my suite lounge to record. Realizing that all my suite-mates were probably going to walk by the lounge door and hear me ranting to myself about genomic instability (not that they don’t expect this of me by now), I resolved to try to get a good take quickly, perhaps within about twenty minutes or so.
One hour later, I realized this was taking a lot longer than I’d anticipated.
The problem was, with everything I wanted to say, the talk was just too long. And there was too much information. I realized, if I were the one listening to this for the first time, I would have a massive amount of trouble following what I was saying. There were too many terms, and too much data, and I was supposed to be writing an elevator pitch, not a comprehensive talk over absolutely every little piece of the puzzle. I decided to be more discriminating when determining what points were relevant to what I was trying to communicate. I omitted experiments that weren't specifically about variation in genomic instability between different cell lines, since I wanted my future directions to be about using the CometChip to assay individual genomes. With each take I would cut out some more extraneous information until I had a more succinct, understandable story.
After two hours, I had decent pitch: it was just a matter of getting a good take. I was a theatre kid for a lot of middle/high school, so I actually really like talking at people about things. I think presentations are fun. Filming myself, however, is really, really tough. It requires enough focus to speak eloquently for three minutes without messing up, which, in theory is simple, but in practice is super challenging. This is because, after multiple hours of staring at a screen talking to yourself, words stop having meaning anymore and you enter a sort of twilight zone where you forget how to speak and you slowly start to forget your own name. It’s true. Actually me during take 14ish:
After three hours, though, I managed to remember my name and I finally had a finished product that I was happy with. After I got the final take, I was really happy that I’d been able to explain a month’s worth of research in such a short time, and I felt like I understood everything better.
On the whole, I thought this was a really valuable assignment. I’m often asked questions like, ‘what are you working on?’ or ‘what do bioengineers do?’ or ‘can you tell me about your research?’ and sometimes I just sit there not knowing what to say.
“Uhhhh, well I’m growing cells to do this cool thing… wait, first I should tell you about… but actually first do you know what this word means….?"
Saying things succinctly is very difficult for me (which is probably evident from the length of this blog post), so I really appreciated the opportunity to work on this. And maybe all my suite mates learned something after getting to listen to three hours of muffled ranting. :D
Looking forward to more work presenting, and thank you to the teaching faculty for a great module one!
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