Today was presentation day at CHTM. All the REU students (me included) gave a 20 minute presentation about what we have been doing for our research. I don’t know why, but I get extremely nervous for these presentations. The strange thing is I have a lot of experience speaking to crowds of people. I used to teach continuing education classes, and was never even a little bit nervous. I wonder what is going on?

Anyway, all this week Dr. Koch, Anthony and I have been working on my Mind Map presentation. I wanted to do something different from the standard PowerPoint presentation. Don’t get me wrong, PowerPoint is a good tool, I just wanted to do something different. We decided a Mind Map would be a good way to show case one of the many tools/applications that we use here in Kochlab.

In addition, I handed out little cards with a qr code and a short link to a google docs spreadsheet with links to many of the tools we use for our ONS. My Mind Map also had links to most of the information that I used for my research and presentation.

After it was all over I realized that I had forgotten to show the really cool, time lapse growth images that Anthony had put together for the D2O experiments.

Next presentation I will take Dr. Koch’s suggestion and practice, out loud, the entire presentation. If I do this several times I might not get stage fright quite so bad.

I’m really grateful for the opportunities that have come my way  since I’ve been working here at CHTM and KochLab. Dr. Koch and Anthony have been absolutely great to work with. Linda Bugge has been a good friend and really helpful with all the administrative “stoof.” It is an honor to have been selected to be a part of the NSF grant. I’m meeting some really awesome and brilliant people here. I’m super lucky.