A nightmare unfolded as Shawn Hayes presented his graduate work at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. His computer crashed just as he was starting his 12-minute talk, requiring a 4-minute reboot. With one hand Hayes tried to find what was wrong with his laptop, while with the other he gestured to the audience as he explained figures from his first slides. "I was able to stay on track because I had memorized my talk," says Hayes, now an adjunct professor of physiology at the University of California, Davis. "All the big people in my field were going to be there so I wanted to know it backwards and forwards." The preparation paid off— he recovered smoothly from what could have been a talk-ending glitch, and subsequently received several offers of postdoc posts.
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