I had most of the audience in the 200(300?)-seat auditorium nearly falling out of their chairs laughing while presenting my research as an analogy of a deadly game of cops and robbers. This is going to be hard to top next year.
To be honest, I didn't know if that analogy was going to work--trying to think of something funny to diffuse the boredom of a technical seminar is difficult to do. Besides, I don't consider public speaking one of my stronger points. Writing words is one thing; saying them is another. I'm okay in front of people. My main fear is forgetting what I'm going to say.
I was very jittery the entire day. Not only was I worried about not remembering anything or the fact that the other people speaking are very comfortable in front of audiences despite their protests to the contrary, but that I would be asked a question that I should be able to answer but can't. Or that a question would be asked and there would be a suitable answer, but the questioner is more concerned about making you look like an incompetent. Some profs are like that--they have a seemingly sadistic glee in taking down the hapless student into a gibberish mess. In my case, a particularly evil question would be asking me to tell the difference between all the interleukin proteins (at least 30 of them currently, I think) or even worse, all the CD (clusters of differentiation) antigens (247 currently, not counting the further subdivisions like CD1a,b,c,d). The question would be vaguely tangential to my stuff, but it would still be grossly unfair.
The bad part was the hour before the talk. I couldn't tell if I was just extremely nervous or flat out scared and anything anyone said just went into one ear and out the other. (Fifteen minutes before, one of the other students speaking told me, "You're smiling," amazed as if I could be so carefree under the pressure. I blurted out, "That's because I'm nervous!") During the talk, I totally zonked out everything else and concentrated solely on putting one word after the other. Afterwards I just felt drained and relieved.
Thankfully, I didn't get any evil questions, but that doesn't mean that I'm exempt from them next year.
