Practicing,...

The next major event on my list this week was to practice the talk (The meeting is July 13-18, my talk will be on the 16th). I was scheduled to give lab meeting for Dr. Rockstar's lab, and since they are the experts in this field (not Dr. Boss's lab), I elected to practice for them. Dr. Boss and I had work through the slides, but I had carefully chosen all my words yet. My undergrad told me he was excited to come see me talk. I cringe, but I can picture how flattered/interested he must be to see his work fit neatly into the bigger picture.

My twelve minute talk was done in 10 hyperventilating minutes. Fortunately, Team Rockstar had good suggestions for me. I feel good about this- I prefer to give bad practice talks, gets the nerves out early, and practices all the pitfalls so they are easier to avoid in the future.

It all boils down to this- I am nervous about presenting this work because I feel like any fool with an inkling would make the same choices we did, do the same experiments, and end up with the same results. That is the blessing and curse of science- given the same results, we should all be able to make the same conclusion. Since it seems so painfully obvious to me, I skip past describing in detail the experiments I actually perform- they aren't hard, but I am the only one in the field that still does these things. Oh. Right. In fact, working for Dr. Boss (who is not a virologist), means that none of the assumptions of my work would be obvious to a virologist. That is the beauty of working for Dr. Boss. Team Rockstar also helped me through so sticky points- make the hypothesis sound stronger, connect some ideas more often. There were some opposite suggestions to what Dr. Boss had suggested, which made Dr. Boss laugh. With yet more practice, it can indeed be a good talk.