Presenting to Peers

So this is just a random comment, but I realized recently how infrequently a grad student gets the opportunity to present to his/her peers. Well actually I didn't realize it, a friend of mine in the program realized in and brought it to all of our attention. He offered to start off a set of presentations that we, as students, would give to each other.

This may sound a little ridiculous at first. You're thinking: "What on earth is he talking about? Poster sessions, journal clubs, lab meetings, maybe a departmental presentation or two aren't enough?" Well, yea, I guess those are quite considerable. Our peers form most of the audience for those presentations. But in those circumstances there is almost always an authority figure present. There's your PI or even other PIs and members of your thesis committee. There's a program director or maybe even a judge who is looking for the presentation that wins a prize.

And that is great. Don't get me wrong; we need that. But where is the opportunity for us to grow into independent scholars? Where is the opportunity for us to shape a presentation style that is designed to speak to an audience that understands the material at our level, and on our own terms? I've noticed that the talks that are most captivating at conferences are those that are delivered with a sense of familiarity and comfort with both the subject mater and the audience. They're often delivered with humor and the occasional hint of wry, self-deprecating humility. If we want to train not just scientists, but communicators, we should give them the chance to train their art in an uninhibited setting. I'm concerned that always reporting our results in front of people we need to impress may further entrench systems of jargon and insular academic perspective.

I'm not trying to badmouth lab meeting or committee meetings. Those are opportunities to expose our line of research to outside challenge, and sometimes even outside attack. We need that. We need to learn to think like scientists. That means constantly revisiting our own assumptions and our own familiarity with our discipline. But maybe every once in a while the big guys could step out of the room and us baby scientists could talk about what we do to each other. It might save a little adrenalin for another day, and it might foster lines of cooperation between students that could last through our careers.  And who knows, maybe we wouldn't have to sit through so many presentations that sound like someone reading through their alphabet soup.

Too many articles, too little time

How on earth do you drudge through the literature? I guess a good number of people read the abstracts and skim for interesting figures. A few others hone their area of interest into such a tiny corner that they can actually be completely up to date (in, say, VHL and HIF1alpha interactions in hypoxic conditions in HeLa cells under 10% FBS concentration, or whatever).

But where is the fun in that? As someone who got interested in science because it was just, so damn cool, I don't want to give up that connection to the broader picture. I'm not particularly interested in participating in the construction of my very own, brand new pigeon hole. I can see the wooden outlines now: using sequencing technology for subtyping of malignant melanoma in a clinical setting using gene list X. I will know everything about how to use sequencing technology Y to look at melanoma genes X in patient group Z. I mean I will be able to take the kids to school with my most scholarly, mind numbingly in depth knowledge of XYZ. But I will have forgotten the wider goal, the bigger picture. I will have specialized in the war of 1812 only to find that World War-Eleventy-Two is raging on without me.

Solutions? Google Reader sure seems like a good shot at trying to stay mildly up to date. Even there I get ruggedly behind. What I really need is a second brain that can sift through all the sludge to find those nuggets of thrilling wisdom. Anyone know where I can get one of those?