Students will be able to prepare and present, orally and in writing, to scientists in
other disciplines and audiences outside the sciences.
I have presented at Longwood Research Day every year that I have attended Longwood. I have done presentations to other biology faculty and professors and to faculty and students in completely different areas of study. This changes the context of the presentation depending on who is listening and how I am explaining my research. During this there is usually only a ten minute timeframe to get across your information effectively. This has been a very hard thing to do for me because I find it very easily to speak for ten minutes at a time and feel like I am explaining my research well, but I am not talking about the correct things. It had taught me my presentation may depend on how many people and their concentrations. Not every time I give the same presentation will be the exact same. For my biology 488 proposal presentation I have had to practice being persuasive and enthusiastic on my topic because I am asking for something and trying to convey an ongoing issue. It is different than presenting on my previous research projects where I have already done all the data collection and analyzing because it is not easy to have all the answers to something I have not actually done yet. This means I need to be very persuasive on why this is important and what my call to action is.
This is a very hard thing to do because describing your research to those who do not study anything similar to it. It must be educational but not so much that the audience has no idea what I am talking about and glaze over and my point is completely mute. Do this multiple times has given me a lot of experience in this I feel as though I can effectively articulate my ideas.