Undergraduate Research Symposium

Today I got up extra early and went to the research symposium. We were one of the first people to set up. We first got our name tags, program, and tacks to hang up our poster. We then hung around for a while waiting for people to come around. Me and Derek were there for about an hour and a half. It was actually really dead for the first hour. Around 11, more people began showing up. However, not many people asked questions about our poster. They just looked at it, and moved on to the next one. More of our group came at 1130, and we all attended at 1215, right before class. My overall impression, not to be negative, but was that the symposium was not very beneficial to me. I did not get much out of it. When I was there, everyone just walked by our poster and didn't seem interested in it. I think that changing the color of the poster worked well, because it was more appealing to the audience. I probably would have been embarrassed if we did not change the color because it wouldn't have looked professional compared to the other posters. The thing that I would change about it would be marketing for the event. Maybe it was just because I was there early, but there definitely were not many people there, which made it feel like our hard work was almost a waste. I enjoyed looking at our poster and realizing that we did accomplish something this year. I liked that ours proved we actually made a difference, rather than just displaying information. I learned how to illustrate a process efficiently on a poster, keeping in mind rhetorical situation of audience and purpose.