Yes, I have two questions for you...
It might seem like this is a less-than-exciting post from the outside, but for me, presenting at group meeting was really exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. My mentor has decades of experience in the field of tissue engineering and the rest of the grad students and post docs in the room definitely know way more about this topic that I have learned in my 10 weeks here, so it was pretty intimidating to be up there presenting on a topic that most people knew more about than I did.
I got completely peer-pressured by the grad students in my lab to present, so my mentor didn’t even know that I had prepared something until 5 minutes before I presented. Apart from minor technical difficulties with the projector at the beginning, my presentation went off without a hitch. I even got a few compliments later in the day from some of the grad students (and they totally sounded genuine!).
The part I was most nervous for was question and answer time… A newly minted PhD (he had just successfully defended his thesis 3 days before!) asked a question about the cells I was using that I was able to answer very easily. Then my mentor raised his hand and my stomach dropped when he said “Yes, I have two questions for you…” Luckily, they were pretty easy: “What was your favorite part about this summer and what was your least favorite part?”
My favorite part was probably theAdvances in Tissue EngineeringShort Course that my mentor put on. It was awesome to hear all the speakers and I got to learn a lot more about the field. My least favorite part was probably just that I didn’t really know what I was getting into at the beginning of the summer. The projects that people do in this lab are not those that can be scaled easily into a 10 week period. For that reason, it was initially hard to determine a good project for me. It all worked out in the end though, and I’m actually pretty excited to present on SURF seminar day in October (I have to write a paper and make a poster first though….).
This is kind of cheesy, but here are some of my slides! It’s a really bite-sized overview of my research (without all my other commentary).
Sarah
