Look at the Audience, Speak Clearly, Don't Sound Like an Idiot

Next Wednesday my fellow labmates and I will embark on a four-day trip to Philadelphia in order to attend a conference of the Society for Investigative Dermatology. I found out last week that my abstract (short summary of my work) was chosen for a talk. Next Friday night between the hours of 6pm-9pm I will be standing up at a podium in a large room giving a talk to roughly 100+ experts in the field. I have always been afraid of public speaking, but I have to say that all of my presentations in classes at Columbia have really helped. One thing that I have in my favor is that all of the work is my own, which always makes it more comfortable and easier to explain. I gave Angela, my boss, a practice talk last week and we decided that I have two main goals: talk slower and try not to make the presentation sound memorized. The first one I can do, but the second one is a bit harder because I have presented the same slides so many times at lab meeting that I just go into auto-pilot when I see them. I've changed a few things around and added some new results, so hopefully that problem will be cleared up. Even though it scares me to death to get up and talk in front of the audience that will be there, it is an honor and good for my career. That being said, we are apparently going to some crazy seafood restaurant on the pier immediately afterwards where I plan on having enough drinks to forget about any of the questions that I couldn't answer after my talk.