This blog is written over the course of a few days.
I'll prelude this by saying this is my first time being out of the country and it really shows.
I had to get up bright and early at 4:30 AM on Sunday morning in order to make a flight to get here to Toronto, CA (Canada, not California). This really resulted in me being dead tired and not doing too much on the first day of being here.
My second day in Toronto, we went to the Royal Ontario Museum and walked around the city for a while to become acquainted with it. In order to get there, we traveled by subway (my first time doing that). It's really interesting to see how different everything is when I'm not loafing around in just South Carolina. Advertisements for bottles of "pop" displayed in milliliters instead of fluid ounces, for example. Or even when I see a sign say "100 km/hr" is the speed limit. It's perplexing to me. I know what a meter is and, thusly, know what a kilometer is. But I really have no idea how 100 km/hr translates over to miles/hr. I could do the math relatively easily (about 62 mph, apparently), but in the spur of the moment, it's just... different. I'm consistently working on my presentation for the conference (I give a talk tomorrow afternoon) and, while I believe I am ready content-wise, I am a bit afraid I might run into some issues with timing. We're given 10-15 minutes for our presentation and a 3-5 minute Q&A. I have practiced a few times, really just hammering home the content and saying what I want to say, but I keep breaking 15 minutes. I will have this worked out before I present, but it is a little nerve-racking.
So now let's talk about the actual bulk of the conference. A lot of the presentations were really not that interesting to me since this conference is actually the culmination of three conferences, with the other two focusing on economics/marketing and business. These presentations really did not appeal to me, but I still sat through and learned some things from them. Some of the moderators for the conference sessions were not assertive enough when it came to time. We were supposed to have 10-15 minute presentations and I listened to quite a few 30-40 minute presentations. When it was time for me to present, I was a bit nervous, but as with any presentation, that nervousness dissipated in a matter of seconds after starting to talk. I felt that my presentation was going to work wonders because Jake, Dr Anderson, and I worked really diligently to get it to a really nice spot. Most presentations we watched were text-heavy and had entire paragraphs and abstracts on slides and a lot of the presenters just read straight off of their powerpoints. Our presentation had 3 or less bullet points per slide and were only topical; I really just utilized the images to make the points I wanted to make. I believe presentations like that should be supplemental to the actual "talking" that the presenter is doing. When I was first called up to present, I was introduced as "Professor Turner" which I found to be funny because, well, I'm just an undergraduate student. What makes this even better, however, is the fact that we were awarded "Best Paper" of the session we participated in directly after my presentation (Facebook Picture With Certificate). Overall, this experience was enlightening and a fantastic adventure. There are still presentations I will be attending throughout the day, but this is the last day of the conference. Our flight leaves at 7PM tomorrow so I will get some time to explore Canada even more.
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