Presenting...

This week was a quiet week for research, but not for lack of work. Rather, I was exceptionally busy making edits to my dissertation, as it is due to my entire committee by Sunday. At FSU we have a 4-week policy, where PhD candidates are expected to submit their dissertation to their committee at least 4-weeks prior to the dissertation defense. This timeline allows the committee to read, critically evaluate, and prepare for the dissertation defense. I'll talk more about how a dissertation defense works in a future blog. I'm quite proud of the work I've accomplished over these past five years, and based on the initial feedback I've received from my co-advisors, I think they are as well.

Aside from preparing this dissertation, I had the joy of listening to our students give their first research presentations in class. One of my favorite (or maybe my favorite) class that we have in our biology department is the undergraduate experimental biology course that I am currently a teaching assistant for. The purpose of this course is threefold: (1) to meet the university oral communication competency requirement; (2) to meet the upper division writing requirement; and (3) to engage biology students in the practice of designing and implementing scientific experiments. To meet the oral communication requirement, our students present three times throughout the semester and receive feedback after each presentation. In this course we even give an example presentation that meets all of the rubric guidelines we use to evaluate the students. Today our students presented short talks describing a published research study, with the intention of describing the results from a figure. The next oral presentation will be the students describing their proposed research project, which is a much longer presentation, and today's talk is practice for speaking in front of a crowd and communicating scientific findings. From today's talks and the individualized feedback that we provide, our students will learn about some of their presentation habits, such as using filler words, dropping off the ends of sentences, or having non-linear presentations (presentations where ideas are forgotten and then remembered later so they are mentioned out of order). I think that this type of course should be implemented in more biology departments, because our students build important, foundational skills that make them career-ready and they get to build confidence in public speaking and writing in a welcoming environment.

Over the next few weeks, we will work with the students on designing their experiments and the students will have the opportunity to test out possible methods at the marine lab. They will collect animals and plants, construct experimental chambers and treatments, and hopefully ask lots of questions as they prepare for their next presentation. I'm really excited to see what the students are interested in studying for this class, especially since two students presented on microplastics today and another on macroplastics, though both topics may be extremely difficult to study given some of the limitations for this class. I can't wait, and I hope I can provide some pictures of cool project ideas starting next week. Stay tuned!