One of my favorite classes was an upper level course on the evolution of reproduction, and my final for that course was the one of the pieces of work I’m most proud of from my undergraduate coursework. The assignment was to take a scientific paper related to the course material, and create a 15 minute presentation for a specific audience. I was given a paper on how meiosis evolves and a hypothetical audience of fellow biology students.
Given the complicated material of the paper, I was glad to have an audience where I could assume a good level of background knowledge. Still, I wanted to make sure my presentation was clear and easy to understand. For me, this started with making sure I really understood the material in the paper. Next I had to decide which order to present it in. While the original authors had organized their paper so the broader evolutionary dynamics are described at the end, I thought it made more sense to introduce that material first. In my experience, understanding the general principles helps people comprehend more specific information.
After figuring out my general outline, I started to put together the slides. While writing the text, I found some areas where I wanted to add a little more detail. In particular I wanted to add some real life examples of unique traits that the kind of evolution described in the paper can give rise to. This was also an opportunity to find photos that I could add to the slides.
With the written material and images selected, the final step was to figure out the design of the slides. I chose the fonts carefully, wanting a heading that was bold but not too serious, and an easily legible main text font. I also wanted to keep the slides simple with a white background, and after searching Canva’s element library found a simple double helix design that I could easily use to make a pattern.
Coming back to this project over a year later, I am still quite pleased with how it turned out. When I was putting together this portfolio, I no longer had access to the original recording of my presentation but this did give me the opportunity to make a few edits. Some of my slides had been quite text heavy, so I was able to edit them down and make them less overwhelming. I also simplified some of the visual elements. Overall I really enjoyed revisiting this project, finding the material just as interesting as I originally did, and was proud to find that my work held up.