system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What's your experience in journal clubs? Good or bad?

Hours of tedious summarising/preparation? Boring presentations? Or amazing new articles you hadn't seen? 

I want to hear your journal club experiences :)
gpt
Mediocre is probably the best word for it.  Presentations will vary by person but usually they're ok.  Most people haven't gotten into graduate school without knowing how to present at some level.  Articles will vary too but I've seen plenty of really cool findings and/or methods in journal clubs.

But the audience itself is what keeps things going.  It's supposed to be a discussion in theory.  In practice what usually happens is that graduate students rank journal club about 187th on the list of things they care about, somewhere between the Australian election and local laws regarding food truck sanitation.  So the discussion doesn't go anywhere since nobody cares.  On top of that the few people who do talk often have "/r/science syndrome" and have never seen a paper worthy of their time.  Yes you should read a paper with a critical eye but they'll spend their time talking about how the Cell paper of the week is the worst thing they've ever read.