Genetics Society: Head of the Journal Club

Hello Hello!

I'm Rudy, a second year Applied Medical Sciences Student. I joined Genetics Society hoping to connect with people in STEM and see what the university/London has to offer for recreational science exploration. My positive experience from this past year has based my decision to run for a committee position. If given the opportunity, I would use my position on committee to host in-person meetings once every two weeks, during which members will present a paper in power point format. My hope is that each member will do two presentations over the year.

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Hello everyone, I am Emily. I am very passionate about genetics and this role really attracts me because I find that it is incredibly important to share knowledge and discuss scientific papers. I believe I will be able to bring my roles of organisation and leadership skills to organise events where we can dissect a paper but also events to learn skills on how to read, present and write a good research paper. It would allow me to bring my ideas to this role, such as making it more attractive to students. For example, emailing students in advance for what they would like to see- like a questionnaire, and also sending out summaries of each session so students can learn and refer back to the sessions. My passion is drug discovery, and drug mechanisms that specifically target genes and how they interact with specific proteins that are encoded by genes. I will be able to bring this passion to this role.

By serving as Head of Journal Club, I aim to help:

• Students share their research and gather useful opinions from the audience via interactive presentations
• Presenters and audience to gain invaluable skills like public speaking, presentation skills, and critical thinking
• Society members to explore different research areas by presenting any research articles of interest
  • UCL-based research prioritized

I shall:

• Review and offer advise on articles and presentation organization
• Host and organize smooth and interactive presentations

Changes I propose:

• Joint journal club sessions with other life sciences clubs to discuss interdisciplinary articles
  • Increase audience size and presentation impact
  • Increase topic diversity
  • Make possible more frequent sessions while maintaining reasonable workload for committee members
• Presentations by multiple presenters as an option 
  • Optimal for authors of co-authored or co-reviewed articles
  • Prepare presenters for group presentations
  • Less stressful and encourages more students to present

My experience:

• Co-planning and -hosting a virtual youth STEM conference this summer
• Joining and presenting in multiple journal club sessions during 2 previous internships in university labs
• Joining multiple external research seminars and conferences