Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research

Or SCCUR for short. Ironically I came online partly to write this blog entry up (and partly to print out ochem practice tests) but ended up completely forgetting and getting lost in a sea of no-new-posts message boards. :/

I figured since I do blog posts for things like Anime Expo and game gatherings, this would be rather significant to post too.

Overall experience of the conference: It was decent, I liked it. It feels a bit better when you have something to present and go to these conferences than to just visit them and have the "everyone is better than me because they actually have something to present" feeling that I got last year when visiting a science conference similar to this one... And its also not a "dammit I'm wasting my time here I have an OChem test on monday" feeling either, a feeling I get when I go off to anime club on sundays :p.
Regardless, some nickpicky criticism. So I paid 50 dollars, worked an absurd amount of hours in Lab and risked damaging my academic status to get, basically, a paragraph in a Guide to SCCUR 2006, a lunch (consisting of a ham sandwich, Sunchips (I think that's what they were called), can of Sprite, a Ba(Na)2, and a fudge cookie which I lost shortly after I finished the rest of my lunch :( ) and a few questions from people confused about my poster and brave enough to ask me what it was about. Which, in turn, made them 1. Understand it a little better or 2. confused even more. Let's hope for the most part its the former. Oh! And some pamphlets about a Undergraduate Studies Journal that looked really interesting. I want to write an article for it but I'm wondering about my lack of motivation to do so. :p
Analysis of Poster Presentations: There are two critera for a really good poster: 1. Make it look really interesting and 2. Make it confusing. Usually, making it confusing can very well lead to making it look boring, so this is a pretty difficult task to do. Nevertheless, its quite necessary, because if someone understands your poster, even if it does look pretty, there's no questions to ask because its all self-explanatory and people just walk over, nod your head, and leave. At first I didn't understand why my lab advisors made it so technical (and basically write my entire poster for me *cough*) but now I realize they made it so that people are encouraged to ask questions... provided what I do looks interesting enough.
I personally think my poster didn't look all that interesting, so that's why (I believe) I didn't get as much appeal as I could have. I found one poster that met this "Interesting but Confusing" criteria; it had something to do with Artificial Livers and it had a really nice diagram that looked really pretty but I had no clue what the hell was going on. This does, of course, encourage me to ask the poster presenter what he was doing, but he was talking with other people so I kind of just left him and moved on. :p
Yea, that's also a personal trait of mine, as a poster-viewer, I don't like large groups so I'd rather go visit posters where the person is just standing there looking lonely and unhappy that no one is viewing their poster... although, I can only ask questions if I can genuinely be interested in what their presenting. Obviously, not everything is interesting to me since there are a variety of fields (Seriously now, one poster expects you to know what CT-something is in Electrical Engineering... I'm only in Linear Circuits :( ), but a lot of it seems curious enough.
For the poster presenter himself/herself, I found many are more open to those who ask people "Do you have any questions". This is particularly applicable to me, since I can stare at a poster for 10 minutes without saying anything. Well, sometimes its just me trying to figure out how to put what I'm confused about into a question, other times its because other people are talking with the presenter... Regardless, its something I need to work on, there has been a few people that stared at my poster for a while and I probably should asked them if they had any questions. But I got my fair share of questions. Even got locked up in one of them, that was kind of embarassing...

Questions of the day:
Most Asked Question: "What's your poster/experiment about?" << This is an annoying question. Even if I'm confused about a poster, I don't want to ask this to them because their poster SERVES to explain what the experiment is doing. It is more easier IMO if they be more specific like "What does this word mean" or "What are you doing in this picture" Rather than me trying to explain (for the 8th time) what I'm doing which is basically noted in the damn title. Come on, if you're generally interested at least read the damn thing rather than just ask me "What's it about". -_-
Most Useful Question (well its a comment): I got a tip off of someone who's apparently doing the same research :O I'm sure my advisor already knows him/her, but I thought that was kind of cool. The guy not only read and figured out what I'm doing, but also knew a source which is doing something similar to my experiments and gave me a name... Most helpful guy for the entire hour I stood in front of my poster. :)
Most Entertaining Question: "LOLZ USC hAs a nEURoSciEnCe PrOgRaM???!!1" <<< My internet-talk perception of the question asked... yea... we have a Neuroscience program... that's why I have this poster... (I didn't answer that sarcastically of course :p)

Interesting Posters: Artifical Livers (mentioned above), "How Happy are Chicanos in LA" (My advisor found this one funny), "Learning Statistics through an Online Game" (It was an online dating simulator with statistics! XD) and another poster having to do with the differentation of stem cells... it had a word which I had no idea what it meant and now I completely forgot what the word is, but I remembered what it meant! (has to do with the process of the cell differentiation)