Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Data Dump

The professor next door teaches an upper-level undergrad class on mammalian endocrinology. Last month he asked me to give a guest lecture in his class about my research, with a request to spend at least 50% of my lecture on background material before segueing into current information. I was (kinda sorta) starting on a literature review for lab, so I made my slides based on the review draft and thought I was good to go... until I practiced it in front of my lab.

One of my labmates said that I essentially zipped through 4 papers' worth of data in five minutes, which would be too fast for the audience, who , according to my labmate, would be drifting in and out of consciousness. My advisor said to make the slides more textbook-ish and not show too many cutting-edge things. That's when I found out the statement "because it's cool" is not a good enough reason to show/talk about a specific data set.
I was surprised at the amount of information I had to remove from my first set of slides. I think that "research seminar mode" has become my new default, where I give minimal, but crucial, background information and then immediately jump into what's new. This way, I don't have to feel like I'm repeating myself a million times in order to get a point across.

That being said, it's been difficult for me to realize what constitutes a data dump for an audience of undergrads. During my own undergrad career, one of my pet peeves was when the instructor would write complete sentences (paragraphs, even) on their slides and spend all hour reading off the screen. My issue seems to be the opposite; I'll put six rectangles on the slide and say that they're hormone receptors. Then I'll start talking about how the receptors work, which leads me to signaling pathway A and how it works. After that, if I really start to lose myself, I'll start talking about homologies within species. One of my other labmates said it best: "If you were an undergrad, would you REALLY care that tyrosine 1127 in species X is responsible for signaling?"

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My lecture was on the morning of February 14. The professor had a last-minute trip out of town, so I essentially took over the class. Everyone seemed really engaged and I didn't get funny looks, so I assume it went well.  :-)
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The title of this post comes from a phrase that an emeritus professor introduced us to when he was talking about his grad school days at MIT. It's when you go through so much data per unit time that the audience can't process it all fast enough to ask questions (i.e. question your technique).