CRISPR-IRL

As I look at my calendar, I realize November is already halfway complete... where has the time gone??

I feel like I only started understanding how CRISPRi worked yesterday. That's an exaggeration. Last week. For some reason, it was really difficult to differentiate the names and roles of the different plasmids in the CRISPRi process until right before Journal Club. Even then, I felt shaky.

I was actually really excited about the Journal Club project. I've sat in on Journal Club presentations in my UROP lab meetings plenty of times, but I didn't realize exactly what was happening until this assignment. Once I realized that I would be presenting another person's work from back to front for a group of people much more intelligent than myself, I began to feel more nervous.

Despite this, I was still ready.

I was prepared to read my article several times, annotate the crap out of it, make the best figures and title slides you'd ever seen. Journal Club was gonna be totally owned by me.









And then, just like that, life gets in the way.

I couldn't find the time to put into the presentation that I'd intended. I was inadequately prepared and felt defeated before I even began my presentation.







I was sort of confused. I was probably even less prepared for the presentation I had the next day in my HASS class, yet I was not nearly as nervous about it as this one. But this makes sense. The JC presentation required much more knowledge than my HASS presentation.

In the end, this was a learning experience. I know to strictly allocate time for preparing for JC and to make sure I practice what I want to say in order to prevent my nerves from showing and taking up all of my time with the word "um."

I spoke briefly with Noreen about this, but I think it would be useful to have multiple Journal Club presentations throughout the semester. If there were more and each individual one was worth less of your grade, you could improve across the semester and not feel it was so daunting a task. We could get used to what it would be like in a real lab, doing them every week or every few weeks. If we even only did parts of it and had to present a figure to the class in a formalized structure, that practice would be so helpful in making each full presentation better.