Milestone Moment: My 1st Talk

While I spend a lot of time blogging about the short and sweet moments of free time that I have as a busy graduate student, I don't want to lose sight of blogging about the things that I do in my program as well.  Usually the reason that I don't write about the things that I'm doing as a student is that all the posts would look like this.

or how discuss how perfectly this picture describes my life

But I want to document all of the meaningful things that happen for the first time in graduate school, and so I'm starting this miniseries of firsts called "milestone moments", and I had one a few days ago.

Every Friday, the people involved in the cognitive psychology program at NIU (faculty and grad students) get together and share research that they've been working on, as well as ideas they are interested in pursuing. The schedule is predetermined on the first day of each semester. On my first day in lab, I was assured that since I'm only a first year, I surely wouldn't be asked to share anything. After all, what would I possibly have to share? I've barely started to scratch the surface of what I'm dearly hoping will be a long and fruitful research career.

To my surprise, by the end of the first meeting I somehow found myself on the first semester lineup of presenters. Toward the start of November I was to give a presentation on the work that I'd done at my previous university with my former research mentor. Despite my initial reaction and desire to insist that I merely observe the first semester of presentations, I found myself taking the bull by the horns and confidently telling everyone that I was down for a talk.

Let me clarify something...I have had a few experiences already presenting research. This same study was featured at GVSU's 2012 Student Scholar Day, and at the 2012 Science and Art of Aging conference in Grand Rapids.
But I have NEVER given a talk. And standing by a poster and giving an hour presentation are two very different things.

See, when you stand by a poster, you only need give a 3-5 minute description of the project, and answer specific questions that people might have. This is a lot different than preparing 45 minutes of spoken material and trying to anticipate unexpected questions.

You will be happy to know that my first talk was a success. Thankfully, I've been reading about the topic this research is on for over a year now (as I'm hopefully beginning a new related project in the immediate future), so to some extent I can attribute the success of my very first talk on Friday to the number of hours I've spent on reading related literature. I can of course also thank my advisor for the hours of facilitated discussion on the topic that reinforced my comprehension of the complexities of the theory itself.

I can also thank my capstone professor from GV, who taught me a number of things in my final year at GV that included the following:
1) always make sure your audience understands the methods you used in your study
2) if someone is perpetually frowning during a presentation, it is NOT an indication that you are doing a bad job, or aren't being clear.

So! First research talk = success! Looking forward to the next milestone moment coming up this week which will take the form of attending my first professional conference.