I have been absolute crap at communication lately... I could try to explain it again, but it’s
mostly going to be a series of me complaining about how much work I’ve had, and
how little sleep I’ve gotten, which really isn’t all that interesting. So, instead, this is going to be a post about
storytelling.
Storytelling sounds easy, but it’s actually quite
difficult. You need a beginning, middle
and end, and they somehow have to be both coherent and interesting. You have to consider your audience, and your
word choice, and the most relevant parts of the story, particularly if you have
a word limit. You have to be able to
explain what you’re talking about in a way that doesn’t bore your reader to
pieces, the way I’m sure I’m doing right now (boring you to pieces, that is,
not being particularly enlightening).
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a
storyteller. I always wanted to be the
next great American novelist. There are
more half-written stories scattered around my room than I can count; most of
them are complete trash. Some have some
interesting points, but none have enough interesting points to make them into a
full story. And, certainly, none of them
are the next great American novel. None
of them are even a good novel. Most of
them are five pages long, if that.
My storytelling abilities always got hung up on the fact
that I couldn’t cause a story to spring from my pen fully formed. I couldn’t sit down and write a complete,
coherent, compelling piece, which frustrated me to no end. I thought that being a good storyteller meant
that you could write without thinking about it.
I’ve since learned that I was completely incorrect on that count.
This semester, I’ve learned that a large portion of science
is storytelling. I don’t mean
storytelling in the fictional sense, of course.
I mean it more in the sense that your data will probably make zero sense
to anyone but yourself without some explanation.
It’s also storytelling in the sense that the success of your research
completely hinges upon your ability to present it in a coherent, interesting
manner- much the same as the stories that I was discussing earlier.
I’ve gotten to do a lot of storytelling this semester. The class that I’m spending the most time on
is 7.18, which is Project Lab. It’s
basically an extension of my UROP, in that I’m doing lab work in my lab, and
then using that lab work to do class work for several hours a week. The class is a “CI-M”, or Communication
Intensive Class- Major (not all of our acronyms make sense... I
don’t think we even tried with that one :P).
What that actually means is that it includes three major presentations
and over 20 pages of writing, a portion of which are turned in in draft form
and then revised. Twenty pages of writing really doesn’t sound like that much,
but to an MIT student used to communicating in numbers and problem sets, a
paper that long can be a touch overwhelming.
And then you remember that the paper isn’t written in normal English,
but in that strange language that is “Science” and you figure out why I haven’t
written a blog post for the past three weeks.
But anyway, back to storytelling. My research topic is reasonably complex, and
fairly specific, meaning that there’s a great deal of background information
needed to fully understand what’s going on.
In my paper and in each of my presentations, I have to explain that
background information, as well how my results relate to the previous research
that had been done on the topic. And it
has to be done in an interesting way.
Granted, this doesn’t necessarily mean interesting in the traditional
sense- it’s probably more accurate to say that it has to be interesting to
scientists studying similar things.
Which, granted, is a fairly niche group.
But even I occasionally get bored with my research (which is why I’m
currently writing this blog post and not the revisions of my paper).
Presentations are even harder. Most of the time, the people reading
scientific papers are going to be people who are already interested in the
topic (believe me, those papers are way too dense to try reading them without
reason to do so). Presentations, though,
are quite often given to people with little or no background in the topic
you’re talking about. You have to be
prepared to walk them through the information, without sounding like that’s
what you’re doing. It’s kind of a
delicate balancing act.
At the beginning of the semester, our first presentation was
just an introductory presentation about what we were doing. I think I would be justified in saying that I
did quite poorly in that presentation.
I’ve never been a good presenter, largely because standing in front of
people and talking terrifies me. It was
the same with singing, or giving our mini-presentations at Christmas time... I
hated having all eyes on me with the expectation that I was going to do
something interesting. This presentation
was no different. Although I knew what I
was talking about, I didn’t manage to communicate that well to my class (as
evidenced by their blank stares back at me throughout the presentation). In my meeting with the professors to discuss
my presentation, I was told that I sounded condescending and bored. This, of course, upset me rather a lot, and
my grad student and my friends go to listen to several minutes of ranting about
the fact that I can’t give presentations, and that it’s not my fault that my
voice is the way it is.
Several weeks of grumpiness and general hatred of
presentations passed. During this time,
we were writing papers, but there was a break from presenting for a while. And then it came time for our second class
presentation. This one went a lot
better. I think this was in large part
because I finished the slides before 5 am on the day that the presentation was
due (unlike with the first presentation), and was able to practice it several times over, in front of different audiences. The storytelling aspect became particularly
clear when I transitioned between different audiences. When I initially gave my presentation to my
grad student, he followed all of my logical jumps, because he has also been
working on the project, and knows what the ups and downs have been. In contrast, when I gave the presentation to
my friends, they were generally able to follow the science, but got super confused by the
logic. As a result, I restructured the
presentation into a more story-like form.
When I presented that version to my class, it went over surprisingly well. I was the only one in my class who was
applauded after their presentation (which may have been more about the content
than my presenting skills, but it was still nice). And this time, in our post-presentation
meeting, I was told that the professors knew they had put me through the ringer
after the first presentation, but that I should actually count presenting
amongst my skills, because the second presentation was just miles better than
the first one.
The comment about sounding bored and condescending this
semester was not actually unique- I’ve gotten that one before, in previous
semesters, and I think even in high school.
So the idea that I could actually be good at presenting, and not just
“not abysmal” was kind of weird. And
honestly, it’s still a weird idea. Why
you would want to listen to me talk, I’m not sure. (For that matter, if you’ve made it this far
in this highly disjointed and horribly written blog post, I’m very
impressed.) But presenting requires storytelling
in a way that writing doesn’t. Both
require knowing your audience and presenting your data in the most effective
way for that audience. But only
presenting requires you to do it orally. You don’t already have a captive audience
when you’re presenting- you have to grab them and hang on to them. And in that way, I think that presenting is
actually harder than writing a paper (feel free to disagree with me... but I
think capturing a captive audience is pretty darn hard).
All of this has been an incredibly long-winded way of saying
that storytelling is important in science, and I’ll get to do a great deal more
of it, both in the rest of this semester (which is only like three weeks....
AHHHHHH) and throughout IAP and the rest of my career. I mention IAP specifically because I’ve been
invited to speak at the MIT Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium, which
means that at the end of IAP I'll get to give a 10-15 minute talk about what I’ve been doing for
the past semester-ish, and convince people why it’s important in the grander
context of science. No pressure at
all. I’m actually fairly excited about
this- I’m just kind of freaking out about the idea right now. Particularly the questions afterwards...
there are about 15 minutes after the presentation for questions, and I’m sure
any professors in the audience will quiz me.
So I’ll have some studying to do over the Christmas break. :P
That’s most of my big news right now. Most of my time is being taken up with paper
writing and trying to get results in lab so that I can write my paper, and last
minute grad school application things.
It’s possible that I’m turning into a ball of stress. But I get to make yummy food for Thanksgiving,
so there’s that to look forward to!
Also, because my storytelling has already been horrendous in
this post, and because I’m still procrastinating on everything else I need to
do today, I’m going to end by sharing one of our assignments from 7.18. It’s a really interesting assignment- the
goal was to write the abstract (sort of a summary paragraph) of our paper so
that it could be read and understood by a group of non-scientists. Like I said, my topic is fairly complex and
very specific, so you’ll have to tell me if things are unclear. This was a rather difficult assignment for
me. :P Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I
hope you weren’t too put off by my horrible storytelling, and that you don’t
get too bored by this version of my abstract. :P
Everyday, our genetic information is being damaged by things
all around us. When the damage is not
repaired, it can lead to diseases such as cancer, or to cell death. As such, our
bodies have various methods of repairing this damage, and specific types of
damage are repaired by specific methods.
For some types of damage, such as the etheno C lesion, the specific
repair method is still in question. In
this paper, we used a newly developed test to examine the possible methods by
which etheno C lesions are repaired. The
test uses fluorescent reporters to measure repair of specific types of damage-
when fluorescence is present, the damage is repaired, and when it’s not, no
repair has occurred. Using cells with
differing abilities to use each method of repair, we looked at the amount of
fluorescence, and determined the likely methods of repairing etheno C
lesions. In the larger context, this
research is interesting because it provides information about the methods by
which specific types of DNA damage are repaired, which could help assess or
prevent cancer risk in the future.
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