I’ve been attending a Neuroscience Journal Club here at RPI since last year. I find they are very informative and enjoyable For those of you that don’t know what a journal club is, I’ll let you in on a disappointing secret: they aren’t held in treehouses

More thoughts and my experience with presenting after the jump.

Journal clubs are a means to expose people to recent research. A individual is assigned as the presenter each week. The presenter then finds an interesting paper covering some predetermined subject (in our case, neuroscience) and prepares a presentation to give at journal club. The presentation is responsible for providing a crash course in any needed background information required by the paper, elaborating on the procedures and protocols used and, most importantly, providing a critical look at the data gathered. After (and often times during) the presentation audience members are encouraged to ask questions. Discussions spark up over various diagrams or research done by other labs.

I love going to journal club and listening to new research. Journal clubs are refreshing because they provide a pool of reports that are varied and interesting. I try to keep track of interesting literature with Medline RSS feeds and various blogs but the science world is very large. It is difficult to flag all interesting papers, even in one field. Its even more difficult (for me!) to find time to read them all.

Furthermore, journal clubs are accessible to everyone. A paper may be very technical but the presentation is often simplified to convey the important ideas, rather than the technical jargon. This was a great help last year when I knew nothing at all. Lastly, journal clubs are typically attended by researchers and professors that are quite knowledgeable about the subject. Listening to them discuss a paper is exciting. All in all, journal clubs are a great time.

Unless, of course, you get picked to present. As it turns out, lucky me was chosen to present at journal club. I am quite honored to be presenting as I’m only a sophomore. But it is a tremendous amount of work.

I would not have guessed it before hand, but it is exceedingly difficult to pick a quality paper. There are many things to consider. Obviously, an interesting paper should be chosen. The paper should highlight some novel pathway or interesting new phenotype. It should be a contributor to the general body of knowledge. The paper should also be on the smaller side so the presentation doesn’t drag on for hours. It should be broad enough that non-neuroscience people can appreciate it (we have cell folks attend ours as well) but specific enough that neuro people enjoy.

And most importantly, you should understand it. I realized that reading a paper and presenting a paper are two completely different beasts. I can read a paper and understand the main ideas, the protocols and the data gathered. However, presenting a paper means you must understand every last detail in case you need to explain it to someone. I found myself looking up countless definitions, references and past research papers in attempts to understand the paper.

Once you understand the paper to the point of dreaming about it at night, then you have to prepare a presentation. The presentation itself is a decent amount of work. The presentation needs to cover the main figures but leave out unimportant ones. It must convey necessary information without overloading the audience. It needs to provide enough details so I, as the presenter, can flow from one data point to the next while at the same time avoiding too much text on screen at once. And lastly, I need to be comfortable enough with the presentation to not look like a clown.

And that, roughly, is what I’ve been doing for the last few days. I’ve given poster sessions on my own research before, but that was much easier in my opinion. It was my research. I was intimately familiar with it. This is someone elses data that I’m trying to understand, which makes a world of a difference.

The presentation is tonight at 5pm. Wish me luck