Lessons From January Day

Over the past few weeks, Mr. Bott and Mrs. Gergen have continuously been telling me two things, "remember your audience, you're always an actor" and "what story are you trying to tell?" Although they were probably saying those things largely for the benefit of my second podcast and picture book, I don't think I actually understood what I needed to do until January Day came around.

To be honest, I was always a little confused about these constant reminders. Wasn't this class all about self-directed learning? I'm learning about the brain because I want to learn about the brain. Why is it then, that whenever I do anything, my work suddenly becomes about making other people understand it. Granted, I was always a little late in realizing that most other people understand things differently than I do. And I know this sounds extremely selfish, believe me, I am quite appalled at myself, but I guess the part that really gave me pause was when I ended up focusing more on making something appealing to others than any other task. It felt kind of frustrating that I was constantly trying to "act" differently than I normally do in order to bring information to others. It should speak for itself, right? I'm just the bearer of facts and interpretations, why do I need to put on a show that's probably more stressful than any journal reading I've ever done? The answer, as I was afraid to ask outright, finally became clear to me throughout the progression of January Day.

Ved and I were discussing robotics and neuroscience. Our "so-what" which concluded the presentation was that oftentimes, we take technologies with great potential such as crispr or machine learning and we over-project their present level of capability, causing great fear of the unknown and eliciting a lack of appreciation for the benefits of such technologies. This wasn't really part of our presentation but I thought a lot about why these over-speculations come about. And just like many scenarios, misrepresentation of facts appears to be the most significant culprit. As I was also dealing with the confusion I had largely bottled up about being an "actor" and always paying attention to my audience, I started to connect the two. If everyone truly and completely understood all that they talked about, be it robotics, genetics, art, fashion, or anything else, there certainly would not exist miscommunication of information. But that's not exactly the case, we don't live in a perfect world. For this reason then, I understand now why Mr. Bott and Mrs. Gergen are pushing me to become more of a proactive and attentive communicator. If I'm learning all of this valuable information, it's my responsibility to make sure that others can understand it as well. That also means it's my responsibility to package the information in a correct way so that those I am talking to feel engaged and are not confused but at the same time, it's also on me to make sure that no accuracy of information is lost throughout this process. That's exhausting. As January Day overwhelmingly passed, so too did this realization finally sink in.

Communication is integral. I think I've been turning a purposefully blind eye to this truth for a really long time. I don't know that I'll stop doing so overnight, but I think January Day definitely helped me to observe that concept which was, in my opinion, far more effective than trying to fathom it as a spoken explanation.

But that's certainly not all January Day taught me. During 1st block, we were preparing, practicing, and making any last minute adjustments to our presentations. Ved and I had written a script and prepared a set of background-esque slides for our presentation but as we were practicing, we realized that we didn't memorize the script so we were looking at the paper and also that it was way too long for a 7 - 9 minute presentation. The first course of action then, was to get rid of the papers and see what happened. So in our second run-through, we thought it would go badly but it turns out spending so much time writing and revising the script meant we knew it pretty well and even the parts which were a little tenuous, we were able to preserve by knowing the sequence of our presentation and being well-versed in our topics. Then, we had to deal with the length. This point was probably most important out of all the prep we did in first block because we had to continually ask what was necessary for us to communicate our story. That included a lot of prioritizing information. So even if one or two of the lines may have sounded really nice and were well-worded, we had to really determine whether or not it was conducive to our "so-what" and with respect to our audience. Despite the way things usually go, we completed first block with about 3 run-through's under our belts and I think we were both okay with that.

Second block was probably the most exhausting part of the day. We completed our presentation 5 times for 5 different groups of people and although we did not change much of anything in between each round, I definitely think we got more and more comfortable with each passing presentation. Timing wasn't too much of an issue - I mean each presentation was probably within a minute or two of the others but for the most part, we did our best to stay within the allotted range. Personally, I know last year in preparing for the STEAM expo, I struggled with talking at people instead of to them. I'm not sure if I fixed that for the January Day presentation but I definitely made a genuine effort to make eye contact and read the room (in whatever limited capacity I was able to). The feedback we got from these groups was incredibly helpful. While many people skipped a couple questions on our survey, others offered advice as well as acknowledgement of certain things we did well, which was appreciated by Ved and I. The two things that most people mentioned were having more balance between the information each of us were presenting and talking about Ved's robot. We were supposed to create a display with my plastic brain and his robot but I ended up forgetting the brain (my bad) so many people commented on the fact that the robot was there and we didn't acknowledge it. Otherwise, there was an approximately equal distribution between people who wanted to hear more about neuroscience, those who wanted more robotics, and some felt the "so what" came a little abruptly.

Some of these comments, due to our time limit on the presentation were a little difficult to address such as more information on either neuroscience or robotics but for the final presentation during fourth block, Ved and I re-distributed the paragraphs more evenly and Ved talked about his robot in two different places throughout the presentation. Although fourth block's presentation was probably our worst round (we were very very tired), I think the whole process of revising the presentation based on a vast amount of feedback was a really constructive experience.

Even though I think Ved and I did fairly well with the presentation, I think we could have worked a little more on making it engaging to the audience. Something interactive may have been interesting to tackle. The other thing is that I think Ved and I could have done a much better job at understanding each other's projects. We definitely understood what we told each other about our projects, but I'm not sure this collaboration really moved either of us forward in a significant manner. I mean, sure, our presentation was something we are both proud of but we could have gotten more out of the collaboration than we did. I'm an extremely poor communicator and I guess that means I'm also a weak collaborator but I hope that by seizing more opportunities in the future, I will make more serious efforts to connect with my peers.

Regardless, I really thought January Day was a great thing. Throughout the entire experience, you could just feel everyone making more and more personal connections with one another and we really started to see the community of thinkers being built between us.