Speaking Out Loud

"If you can speak, you can influence. If you can influence, you can change lives."

Weekly Report 2/12/18 to 2/18/18

Public speaking isn’t easy and the transition this week to a twenty minute speech was a leap from the last speech of around ten minutes. This past week was mainly dedicated to the original work speech which was a twenty minute speech composed of our research, interviews, and original work process. The primary focus was to improve upon the past speeches by attempting to talk slower and improve he introduction. The approach taken to improve the introduction was to insert the story from the introductory speech at the beginning of the year. This specific story combined with the inspiration I got from my grandparents was the base of the introduction.

Personally, my difficulty was on the opposite spectrum of others since I had an issue with minimizing on the content. With Neurosurgery, almost every speech is content and research oriented. However, in order to make the research more intriguing I had to minimize the technical information and accommodate a more interesting spin on the work done for original work. In order to do this, the main focus was on the presentation tool to make it as interactive as possible. With this, we have our original work speeches with utmost confidence and received better feedback in comparison to other speeches.

In addition, this week was the second mentor visit with Dr. Bruno Braga in which we discussed the final product. Dr. Braga liked the initial idea; however, he said it was not necessarily feasible due to the requirement of an IRB to pass which could take months and may not pass since we would have to work with human subjects. Instead, we came up with another idea to do a clinical study on chiari which is a condition in which a part of the brain droops down into the spinal canal. I had not heard of the condition and Dr. Braga stated that he currently has seventeen patients with the condition. Thus, together we can conduct a clinical study using real patient scans and watching patient surgeries to find the optimal treatment options. This case study will provide a more hands on approach to a case study by observing patients with the disease in real life. This will allow for greater and more significant results from the study.

With the vision for final product developing, there are going to be multiple difficulties, but also many successes. I am hopeful of a successful final product with a bright future.