We had a lab meeting earlier this week, and I was the presenter, so I spent a good amount of time putting slides together last week. If the old rule of "a minute a slide" applies, my presentation should have been a little less than 20 minutes long.
It was an hour and a half.
I got interrupted at practically every slide.
And I didn't know the answers to a lot of the questions.
So to fill in some of the gaps, I spent a good chunk of time this past week adding, deleting, and rearranging some stuff so it addressed the comments made in the meeting, and I ran it by my advisor today. The verdict: read some more.
The slides I got the most interruptions at were the slides that described questions I wanted to address via experiments. I kept getting called on for clarifying what the question really was, what my hypothesis was, and the reason why I formed that hypothesis. It turns out that the vast majority of my background information came from studies done in mice, and while it's generally assumed that the results would be the same for frogs, that's obviously not a good enough reason to base a series of experiments off of. There were a lot of preliminary questions that needed to be addressed first, using the FROG as a model before moving on, and I didn't realize that, since I had automatically assumed that an important molecule would be evolutionarily conserved between frogs and mammals.
That being said, there's a surprising amount of information we DON'T know (or I don't know) about frogs. This information had been well-documented in mice, but I had taken this info from mice, extended it to frogs, and proceeded to the next step, without bothering to test to see if the information also held true for frogs.
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Last term in that grant-writing/prelim-giving/paper-reading class, we had a professor come in and talk to us about what makes a good grant. Three basic parts:
1. whats the question?
2. how do you test it?
3. so what? (why should we give you money?)
He said that the reason why a lot of grants are tossed out is because they don't have a good question in mind, and that the "what's the question?" part of the grants is the most difficult to answer. Originally I had disagreed; I thought "so what" was the hardest, since not everyone is going to be utterly fascinated in learning about social behavior in purple carnivorous snails (just an example). However, after the past two weeks of working on these slides, looking over at the comments made, and going back to revise things, "so what" is actually a pretty easy question to answer... once I figure out the question I want to test in my experiments.
So I'll be writing up a list of things that need to be answered, and try to weed out which question is the most fundamental...which will be the starting point for subsequent months.
1 comment:
I agree with the what's the question being the hard part.
My committee meeting had similar stats to your lab presentation- 24 slides, hour and a half meeting, interrupted multiple times at every slide. And the kicker is that at one point when I was asked what my question was I answered it completely wrong. like.... totally. And then after I said it I was like, that doesn't make sense and everyone was like, that doesn't make sense.
so I tried again.
it was pitiful, but it helps to talk to others and make sure you don't waste time before you go off on some experimental tangent.
You're lucky that your lab has those exercises and the first time you do that isn't in front of your thesis committee.
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