Research Talks-Day 1

Today was the first day of my class's research talks. The M2s gave their talks last week, and they are on vacation now. Our vacation starts Friday afternoon.

The way the talks work is that each student gets about 10-12 minutes to present, and then there are 3-5 minutes for the audience to ask questions. The total time for each person to present is supposed to take fifteen minutes, including the time for questions. Ten people presented today, and now eleven will present tomorrow and the last eleven on Wednesday. It was surprisingly interesting to hear about the projects that my classmates were working on. People were doing some really neat things, and the projects are on all kinds of topics from Parkinson's disease to epilepsy to immunotherapy against cancer. I hadn't really appreciated the breadth of the research that is going on here at CCF as much as I am starting to do now.

My talk is tomorrow, so I spent some time today working on my slides and practicing presenting. I ended up with thirteen slides including the title and acknowledgments. That seems to be just the right number. It took me about eleven minutes to go through them, which is right where I want to be lengthwise. A couple of people went over time today, and the moderator was not very happy about that. When I did my journal club talk earlier this block, I went over time too. That was mentioned in my evals, so I need to be extra careful not to go over time again tomorrow.