For those of you not ‘in the know’ the FOS (Festival of Scholars) is our annual celebration of undergraduate research. Each year (well, this year) students from every department get together to share their research. From thesis presentations to panel discussions, the FOS is THE showcase for student ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, and scholarly rigor. Each ENVS senior had the opportunity to present our research to our peers, as well as interested faculty and staff, in the (cacophonous) poster session.
My memory of the poster session is a whirlwind of faces accompanied by a looping track of my ‘Architecture in the Anthropocene’ spiel. I delivered my spiel more times than I can count, beginning as soon as the doors opened and finishing well after the session officially ended around noon. By 12.30 my voice was sore, my poster was smudged with evidence of vigorous hand gestures, and my heart felt nearly full to bursting from the support I received from many fellow students and several interested members of the LC faculty.
Some of the best questions I received came from keen students who tactfully sparred with my ideas. I found those interactions to be the most enjoyable, far superior to instances of head nodding, congratulations, and mentions of ‘cool project, bro.’
The FOS provided an opportunity for me to practice distilling and sharing my ideas with a wider audience than our intimate ENVS community.
The rest of my time at LC is planned to the day. My calendar is full of little reminders to work on this paper, that paper, study for this final, that final (I even have one more midterm!? ECON!!! Really!? A midterm with less than TWO WEEKS LEFT IN THE SEMESTER MY UNDERGRADUATE CAREER) . But the bits of time I’m looking forward to most (at least, in terms of school-related work) are those dedicated to finishing up my thesis. My last reading of my document exposed some grammatical confusions (I won’t call them errors, but there are certainly sentences that could be improved…) and other areas of conceptual murkiness that could use some clarifying paragraphs.
In all, I don’t expect to be writing much more for the May 1st final(!) draft, but think adding a few paragraphs here and there will benefit my paper.
Hmmm. That’s about it for now!
Oh yeah, check out my poster!