Hi everyone!
It was nice to see those who participated in the poster day presentations held at the Graduate Center this past Friday, March 16th. For those who were not there, in addition to Sarah’s post and Yasmine’s post (and anyone else who posted before me) on their research update and experiences of Poster Day, here is my brief synopsis of the event.
It definitely helps to hear from someone who has gone through the same thing that you are going through; I appreciated some of the advice that Daniella Shimoonov wrote in her post regarding her experiences of last year’s poster day. (So instead of arriving at 8:30, I came at 8:45!) 🙂
At 9:15, those of us from the ILLC program met at the registration table where (after sharing and discussing our various levels of nervousness) we got name tags and our portfolios with the schedule of the day and the abstracts that we have each previously submitted. We then got our posters from Professor Barrière or Professor Nissenbaum and hung them up in our assigned places based on the numbers we were given (I figured out why they designated 15 minutes for poster hanging since it took a while!).
After that, we sat down to listen to the speaker, Professor Michelle MacRoy Higgins, who presented her research on The Role of Attention in Word Learning in Young Children. It was an interesting talk about late talkers (toddlers) and their language development compared to their typically-developing peers. I appreciated what she spoke about and how she presented her topic (with passion and a balanced level of prosodic elements, including intonation), as well as the way she had the attendees participate, by showing two short video clips and asking us to focus our attention on how many times the basketball was passed to the players wearing white t-shirts while trying not to get distracted by the players in the black t-shirts or the “invisible gorilla.” (It was really just a person in a gorilla costume, but it was still funny and interesting that only about half of the audience saw the gorilla walk by.)
Next was the poster presentations! The students with the odd number posters presented their research first. That meant that I was one of the first presenters! At first I was bit nervous (even after practicing a few times) and didn’t want people to come to my booth, but after presenting to Daniella Shimoonov and Daniella Bonhomme, I got the confidence boost I needed to give over my presentation in a smooth and sophisticated manner. Soon, I got much more into it, got less nervous and more excited, and actually wanted more people to come!
After an hour (the time really flew by!), it was time to switch with the students with even-numbered posters, so they could present their research. In this way, it gave everyone a chance to present their projects and to see other people’s research presentations. I was glad that I was able to present first which allowed me to be more relaxed and able to fully appreciate the other research projects afterward. There was a great variety of fascinating topics, including research on vocal fry and the effects of drama therapy on Aphasia patients.
The last part of the program included lunch and a visit to the Speech Language and Hearing Science Laboratories. Due to time constraints, I sadly did not have a chance to visit the labs. Maybe next time!