Research Talks-Day 3

The last third of our class presented today, again on diverse topics including cell signaling, preconditioning organs to prevent damage due to hypoxia, and CT scanning. I still learned a lot and enjoyed the talks in general. But I have to confess that I'm glad my class is as small as it is, because I'm reaching a point of talk saturation! Overall though I thought that the talks went really well and everyone did a very good job. Some of my classmates said that they planned to continue working in their labs during the next block. That is kind of the downside of this whole summer lab rotation. It's not really long enough for you to do more than just get some preliminary results. I know that I could have used another couple of weeks for sure, and I think that most of us got the results we presented within the last week or two that we spend in the lab!

I also received an evaluation for my talk yesterday from one of the faculty who was present, and it was mostly positive. The evaluator thought that I should have been clearer about presenting a hypothesis. I definitely did have trouble doing that, mainly because I worked on several projects and kind of jumped around during the summer instead of just working on a single one. I think that next summer I will try to do just one project so that I can tell a more coherent story. (We have to do these research projects and presentations again next summer, only for a clinical lab instead of a basic science or translational lab.) That reminds me: I need to upload my slides to my porfolio also. I'd better do that now while I'm thinking about it.