The end is in sight; how wonderful.

I had my big scary poster presentation yesterday, as scheduled. What I hadn't scheduled is all the extra time it took me. I ended up staying at the Heart Institute until after 12:30am on Monday, after 1:30am on Wednesday night and until 12:30am on Thursday night. The whole process of actually putting together the presentation was a lot more involved that I'd have ever guessed.

But it went well. It was an entire day's affair (9-5) but we had to get there for 8:30 to put together our presentations. It was quite exciting and as everyone put up their posters, it was hard not to look at your neighbours and wish you had thought of that or had less words, more pictures, etc, or used different colours. Everyone went around telling everyone else how much better the other person's poster was.

Basically the way poster day works is 3 or 4 professors are assigned to you and they come around and mark you on how well you take them through your project as well as how the poster looks. The evaluations can take 5 minutes or upwards of 30 minutes per professor, depending on the type of person they are.

I was supposed to have 2 profs in the morning and two in the afternoon but I only had one in the morning. As the morning dragged on people kept stopping by my poster and asking me quite difficult questions. It was great because it prepared me for the actual people who'd be marking me. I think I was able to really get two of my evaluators excited: they even came back after they were finished marking to see my video of mitochondria. (The laptop died on me in the morning so I had to charge it). I think I managed to do a good job on it...and I can't wait to see how I did!

I was really disappointed because I had hoped to win one of the prizes. I know that with 5 prizes among 60 students, the odds were bad but I was feeling optimistic. I really wanted the prize to show my supervisor that I'm really not a dumbass and to kind of recognize all the hard work. So from that point of view I felt like yesterday wasn't a total success.

It's over, at least. Next stop: the thesis. I shudder to think about it. I got home around 5:45pm and went stright to bed. I didn't wake up this morning

Posted on 2004-04-03 at 4:17 p.m. |