Listening to professors describe and teach their work on discovering novel therapies against cancer, one begins to see how they are communicating effectively (I mean, hopefully they are). They 1) pause for questions, 2) describe aspects of their work from the beginning, not skipping steps and assuming their audience knows what they’re skipping, and 3) provide context when linking one part of their presentation to an outside article.
Those three points are crucial to allowing your audience to understand your research in completeness. Remove point one: you have specific audience members curious and/or confused about a topic, making them distracted and unfocused for the remaining presentation. Remove point two: you’ll find yourself using more time having to pause for questions, and this pause opens up potential disorganization of your discussion, as you have so many fragments interrupted from a lack of being clear. Remove point three: the audience may be unfamiliar with the published article you’re referring to and perhaps assume an idea about that article, but it may actually be incorrect and they have an altered idea of what you’re presenting.
There is a plethora of guidelines to follow to be able to present efficiently, particularly when you’re presenting to an audience that is unfamiliar with your topic, like cancer biology and signaling. Relating to the implication of this fellowship, I’ll be tasked with managing this particularity. Surrounded by those across disciplines, I must introduce cancer, its signaling mechanisms, and how these concepts are principal to the study of cell cycles in normal and cancerous cells (my project).
To accomplish such a feat, I plan on using the three methods aforementioned, on top of introducing the idea and true definition of cancer and how it “works”. I’ll use knowledge I learned from the lab and from reading textbooks by Robert Weinberg and a variety of other researchers. Just as instructors in secondary school and university make prepare what they’ll cover, I shall do the same.
Navigating towards my future, I’ll come across folks who need to be briefed on my work and why it’s meaningful. This could come from competing for grants, a research position, or some other type of award. From experiences garnered from the Brackenridge and laboratory work, I’ll be prepared to provide a detailed, concise, and understandable presentation about my research. Being able to communicate to those outside of your field doesn’t just stop in undergraduate studies. It’s important for the rest of one’s research career.