So today was my last day doing actual surgeries - tomorrow I have my last day of clinic with the orthopedic surgeon. We did two arthroscopic surgery repairs, one of them was a rotator cuff repair which I hadn't seen before. Another was an arthroscopic knee meniscal repair, and the other two were hand surgeries: carpal tunnel release surgery and a ganglion cyst removal. I still get along great with the surgeon and his PA, so I'm not worried about my grade for this rotation. He isn't very book-focused and they always joke when they see me studying so much so I assume they think I am intelligent enough.
Throughout most of today I was reading and rereading my presentation for today. As part of our third year clinical rotations, we have to attend didactic lectures on Tuesday, only an hour usually. Every other Tuesday, one or two of us present, and we each have to do a total of two presentations by ourselves - one on a topic that we can elaborate on, and another on a selected clinical case. My turn was today, and my topic was Psychiatry, so I chose Major Depressive Disorder because it is applicable to everyone. I was worried about a lot of things - whether I would run overtime, whether I would bore everyone by talking about antidepressant medications, whether I was saying too much or too little, whether people would be unresponsive or not know how to answer my quiz questions, and whether people are bored to death with depression, because I remember we had a lot of lectures about that at Touro.
Anyhow, I gave my presentation - I got a slight boost of confidence because I went over it orally beforehand and managed to get it down to 19 minutes and 30 seconds, so I wasn't as worried about going overtime. So I gave my presentation, people seemed to pay attention and like it. Basically everyone was answering my pharmacology quiz questions, so it was definitely sticking. When I got feedback, it was essentially a unanimous response that it was the best presentation all year, was really informative, I sounded confident and knowledgeable, had all the information that everyone had been craving, was varied, kept attention, etc. The physician who attends all the didactic sessions and grades our presentations agreed that it was the best all year and was even at the next caliber level for what he expects from us - that it is the kind of presentation one could expect at the professional level at a real conference.
Needless to say, this was awesome. Honestly, I feel like I'm a decent presenter. I try to convey my enthusiasm for a topic and hopefully drag a few unwilling audience members with me, but it worked out great. I used PowerPoint animations, humor, color coding, quotes... this was exactly the boost I needed to help me keep going on through studying boards and rotations. I think I'm going to be happy and charged up the rest of the night! Man.
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