At my first ever conference last month, it's fair to say I was anxious to see what the day held. With little idea of how a conference worked, it consisted of both talks and posters in three sessions. Listening and expanding on both my work and other presenters was fascinating. This particular conference was focused on post-graduate research across biology and geography at the university, so it was one of the first for most there.
With my poster ready and up, I woke up that morning was prepared but nervous to see what the day had in store. Suddenly, I was going to have to display the work I had spent the last three months focusing on, hoping nobody would ask anything I couldn't answer. This was my biggest fear going in, what if I freeze? However, honestly, the questions I didn't have perfected answers for, were the best to be asked. The conference was the perfect opportunity to open up areas for new perspectives. Equally, it was a great opportunity to break out of the one project bubble, and learn about new research unlike my own.
Despite my concerns for the conference, I was excited to show people what my work is about. After all, who could possibly be a bigger expert on your project? Even those working alongside you, don't know every detail the same way. However, this opened up my second fear, was my project actually interesting? But of course it is, or I wouldn't be doing it. And talking to other students, links in interest were obvious both between projects and disciplinaries.
Once I had relaxed in to the day, I really enjoyed learning about everyones work. One of the most important factors to consider for this conference in particular (although I expect in most) is that not everyone is at the same stage. For a start, most of the presenters were PhD students so expectations were completely different. Secondly, no project runs the same way; field work can have a vastly different time frame to labs, studies with direct contact to people and animals will have a much longer ethics process, so it would be unrealistic to expect them to be at the same stage.
At the end of the day I felt ready to step up to the next stage of my project. With half of my fieldwork done, and the first set of results ready to analyse, I am excited to see what's to come.
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