Looking back on 2019

Well, this is my only post for 2019, continuing the long, slow decline of frequency since the peak in... (checks blog)... 2008 with 204 posts! I didn't even write about my expectations and goals for 2019 like I intended. Why not?

I intended to have monthly goals, but I hadn't figured out what all of them were going to be yet. But I had the first two planned. January was going to be no backlog. My interpretation of that was something like "inbox zero" for new stuff where I'd deal with it each day. However, I promptly departed for a 2 week international work trip whereupon that plan went right out the window.

Sigh.

February's goal was going to be to buy our house... and we bought it in August instead. So that didn't exactly help me build momentum with the monthly goal thing. Those were bad goals. For 2020, my first goal is to have better goals.

So without a blueprint of ambitions and expectations laid out at the beginning of the year, I'll just muse on various aspects of my life in 2019.

Home & Family
The most noteworthy thing that happened this year is that we became homeowners! I'll spare everyone the boring complicated details, but we didn't move. It just took a long time to go from being renters to owners. Jon is still loving his work and doing a great job, so a couple of solid years with both of us earning respectable professional wages finally made that possible. We're so glad to have made that leap and thankful to everyone who played a role.

Adele continues her trajectory of awesomeness as a first grader. There have been some new struggles this year with friends, but all part of growing up. In the last year or so she has upped her game skills so we established a weekly family board game night. It's fascinating to recognize some of the odd affinities and hangups she has that I relate to from my childhood. I can tell that she gets worked up by the anticipation of uncomfortable things in a way that I did a lot as a child but Jon did not, e.g. taking medicine. She also shares my affinity for gnarly tree roots and making sets of M&Ms with one of each color.

Friends
This year I canceled a failing monthly event with neighborhood mom friends that I started about 5 years ago. I was bad at reminding people, but I also wasn't hearing from anyone despite the recurring calendar event. Sometimes no one showed up, which was kind of depressing for me. Jon is the kind of person who commits heavily to a small group of friends. He has about 5 close friends and at least any two of them are over at least 2 times per week to play games. I hang out with them too, but I also want my own group of close friends. The kind of sad truth for me is that I really don't have a close friend here. I know a lot of people and have a lot of friendly acquaintances who could potentially be closer friends, but I couldn't think of anyone I felt close enough to to invite to my birthday dinner. I work too much and volunteer too much and try to do too much around the house and don't do a good job prioritizing friendships. I skype monthly with my two best friends from grad school, I'm in close with a college friend who lives a few hours away, and I hike monthly with a few women, but sometimes I am sad that I don't have more regular hang out friends around here. It's not like there aren't cool people here. I need to do a better job in 2020.

Travel
I traveled for work in January, February, March, April, October, and November. Half the trips were international. For the first time since our honeymoon in 2009, we managed to combine a work trip with a family vacation. Considering how many trips I've done for work since then, that's kind of insane. It just either hasn't made sense logistically (especially with a kid), or been feasible financially. But this year, Jon and Adele joined me at the end of a work retreat and we made a long weekend of exploring a different part of the country.

Our biggest family trip this year was visiting Disney with my parents. Adele was such a fun age for it (almost 6). We also did a couple of shorter trips to visit friends and attend our college reunion.

Career
I'm established enough in my position now that this year I've gotten the highest profile invitations of my career. I did a handful of interviews and gave a couple of prominent invited talks. For the biggest, it was an entirely new talk for which I spent at least 60 hours preparing, and I knocked it out of the park. I've never received so many compliments in my life. That felt good. Then I slept for 11 hours straight.

Stuff and Attention
I watched Marie Kondo's Tidying Up and parted with a lot of clothes and books. I have a growing realization that I'm trying to fit too much into my life (in terms of my time and commitments), and cluttered corners of the house are a reflection of the same phenomenon, but with physical things. Watching Tidying Up helped me think about what I can be grateful for but let go. I'm trying to do a better job of not trying to hold too much, physically or metaphorically. I still have a lot of papers and misc to go through to decide if they spark joy.

This year I also read How to Do Nothing by Jenny O'Dell (so did Obama, btw) which got me thinking even more about the attention economy and how to make conscious decisions about my attention. I've definitely spent less time on conventional social media this year, especially Facebook. I have some complicated thoughts about my role in the attention economy but I really enjoyed the book.

Work & Emotional Labor at Work
Last year I reflected on some of the growing pains from moving into my dream job. This year has overall been much smoother with my colleagues, but I'm definitely feeling the stress of being at the interface of internal and external expectations. There are a handful of difficult external people who I've had to deal with, and the amount of emotional labor and time it takes to interact with them is exhausting. It has been difficult to know the best way to proceed in many circumstances and definitely caused me to lose sleep.

One night I had a dream that I was near a forest fire. For some reason, I thought I could get closer and still get back out safely (I can't even remember why). But in my dream, the fire quickly got more intense, and I was trapped and had to be rescued. I realized I was a fool for going in because I had not only endangered myself, but the person who had to come rescue me.

I woke up from this dream with the realization that I needed to set clear boundaries with the difficult person I was dealing with at the time. I took it as a warning that if I didn't, I was putting my team and project at risk by proceeding. Essentially, this difficult person was an unpredictable forest fire capable of inflicting damage.

I love my job. I care about it so much that I have a hard time not working. I'm almost always trying to accomplish more than is realistically possible in a week. The team had many great successes this year, but I've also wasted a bit of time on some things that kind of flopped. We didn't lose anything but the time we put into it, but I feel a little self-conscious about those things. However, I've more than succeeded in many other areas, so it's just good for me to hone my sense of where to put my effort and attention. I also think I did a great job foreseeing a potentially disastrous collaboration and cutting it off, though it caused me a fair amount of anxiety for months before finally made the call. I probably should have done it sooner, but I kept hoping they'd get their act together.

I don't like saying no or letting people down, so I sometimes have trouble setting boundaries for work and prioritizing. I should be more strict about that in 2020, for my own sanity and health.

Volunteering
I've also done a lot of volunteering this year. One of the things I volunteer for has a strong interaction with my work, but it's not exactly part of my job. Over the last year it's been exciting to see how it has grown into a movement, and I'm not having to manage all of the mental responsibilities for it anymore.

I'm also nearing the end of a long-term volunteer commitment and find myself looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. It's been a bit more stressful than fun for the last 2 years. Perhaps I should write a longer reflection on it at some point.

I've organized a lot of events. Some for volunteering, some for work, and I have less and less patience for it. It falls into the category of something I'm pretty good at but don't enjoy. I hate all of the little decisions about the venue, the food, the budget, etc. I should have a personal limit for event organizing and stick to it.

Ritual
I did a good job of committing to a particular ritual every day (~95% success). I plan to continue the ritual for the foreseeable future.

Health
Last year I noted my weight had crept up more than I was comfortable with (i.e. my clothes weren't fitting), so I'm pleased I managed to lose about 10 pounds this year (though it went up first before it went down!). However, I have probably had higher blood pressure this year than ever before, thanks to these aforementioned difficult people and generally working too hard. I'm not really exercising though, so that's not great.

Just before leaving for 10 days of travel in October, I made a frantic dash out the door for something that was urgent but not really very important, and in my haste I fell down a few steps onto the sidewalk. I scraped myself up pretty badly and hit my cheek on the concrete. I ended up with a spectacularly awful black eye, but honestly I'm grateful that it wasn't worse because I easily could have broken something. It was a wake up call for me. I took it as a warning to make sure I don't try to do too much, get hasty, and break myself (or my work) in the process and ultimately make things unnecessarily more difficult.

All in all, it's been a great year and I can hardly complain. We're incredibly fortunate. Wishing all who read this a healthy, just, and peaceful 2020!

Hands off

Herb, my committee chair, is on sabbatical this semester. I've emailed him about my chapters, mostly to get his final approval on sending them out to the committee after Sam has already been over them. I haven't seen or had a conversation with Herb since December, and won't see him until the morning of my defense on Tuesday. Seemed like we should have some kind of meeting before my defense, so we just had a 5 minute phone conversation. Herb is a hands-off advisor indeed.

He said, "Well, it looks like a dissertation, it smells like a dissertation, so I think it's a dissertation." He doesn't think I'll have any problems. That's a relief.

For the last 3 days before my defense, I'm focusing on preparing the best presentation I can.

Things you do for your advisor

I made a huge email-skimming mistake on Sunday morning. In reply to an email thread about something else, Sam asked (I thought) if I could talk about two of my research projects on Friday morning. I thought he was scheduling a skype meeting so I said sure. I was kind of confused why he wanted to talk about one of them since it's finished, but whatever.

Then on Monday afternoon he replied with excitement saying something about how awesome his students are this semester, and mentioned another skype meeting we had to schedule. I didn't understand why his students were relevant or why he was so excited, but whatever.

Then today I got an email telling me where his class is on Friday, bring my adapter, blah blah blah "...after your presentation."

OMG. I finally get it.

I accidentally agreed to GIVE A TALK about my research, not TALK [with him] about my research. For an hour. Oops.

I am just going to throw something together from a seminar I gave last year, ESA, and my committee meeting in December. I cannot afford to spend a lot of time on this, but I also think it would be crappy of me to back out. I've talked about and thought about this stuff enough that I can wing it for some undergrads.

I'm not allowing myself to work on this presentation until I get a chapter draft sent to my committee. Writing comes first.

Looking back on 2012

I set out an ambitious list of goals for 2012. How did I do?

Academic/Career
Get something published in 2012.
YES! Both papers that were submitted at the end of 2011 were accepted in 2012. And as a bonus, another paper just got accepted with minor revisions! Only one of these is a chapter in my dissertation, but I've got publications! Woo hoo!

Submit Best Project for publication
Not even close. Best Project is going to be two manuscripts. One of them has been the source of much frustration and the other isn't written yet. Argh.

Conceptualize my dream job(s).
Not really, but I did start applying- to a grand total of two. I'm out of the running on one of them already. At this point, I don't think I have time to sit around imagining my dream job and I just need to apply to anything that seems doable.

Give a talk at the big ecology conference and present at at least one other conference. 
YES! I presented at two conferences and had a blast. I still love conferences.

Do an outreach project. 
YES! Unfortunately, that's all I can say.

Update my webpage once a month.
Not quite. Looks like I updated it 5 times this year. I made sure to do it when I had big updates, so I didn't completely neglect it.

Fitness
Do a sprint distance triathlon and one other race.
I did the tri, but not another race. My mom and cousin did a triathlon too (first time for both), and hopefully we'll make it something of a tradition.

Exercise 4x or more per week. 
In the first half of 2012, I averaged 2.25 times per week, and since then I've averaged about 2.3 times per week. This counts conferences and holidays and being sick, so I think that's not too shabby. It also doesn't include dancing or my bicycle commuting.

Do yoga once a week. Revised! Goal: 30 minutes of yoga per week and pushups (following the level 1 plan here) if I don't do some other kind of exercise.
So I kinda sucked at this. I've wanted to do more yoga since becoming pregnant, but not even close to once a week. Pushups? My wrists just aren't cut out for it. Fail.

Go dancing at least 12 times. 
YES! 13! I went 13 times! My high school self would be so disappointed in me that I dance so infrequently. Oh well.

Home
Learn and perfect an easy, delicious vegetarian lasagna recipe. 
No, but I did find a great recipe for mushroom quiche. I should try harder with the lasagna but I have no desire to make lasagna when it's hot outside so that limits the times in the year when I can pursue this worthy goal.

No more ugly houseplants.
I bought myself some pretty ceramic pots, so that helped. This is on ongoing process.

Get the dog to walk better. 
She has improved some, but still isn't great.

Visit at least half of the places on our must-see list for Big City. 
Wow, not even close. I think we might have done 3 or 4 things on our list.

Offset our carbon emissions. 
No...

Blogging
Blog at least once a week.
Not really. I made 59 posts this year including this one, so that averages more than once a week but I had many weeks where I didn't blog at all.

Label my posts and keep them labeled.
Yep. I think I've caught up on unlabeled posts from earlier field work and I've been labeling new ones.

Metagoals
Review goals quarterly. 
How about bi-annually? I only reviewed them in June (Academic, Fitness, and others) and now. I just kept procrastinating in March and September until it was June and December.

Make weekly agendas for myself. 
Yes. Each week I send an email to a friend of mine reporting on last week's goals and the goals for the upcoming week. I keep the electronic list somewhere that I can easily refer to it to keep me focused. I've recently modified this to break my goals down into tasks for each day, which makes the big things seem more manageable. 

Overall I worked many fewer hours this year than last year (2239 hours instead of 2750), but that still works out to 43 hours/week across all 52 weeks of the year. No field work in 2012- makes a big difference! I was still able to make good progress towards my career goals (i.e. dissertation) and do plenty of fun things too. Oh, and make a baby-- that was an unwritten goal for 2012 :-)

Well 2012, it's been fun. Tomorrow I'll to write about what I've got in store for 2013!

Observations from ESA

What a week! I am so glad I went and also so glad that it's over.

Some thoughts:
-I saw very few ugly posters. Lots of pretty good ones, and a few really excellent ones.
-I saw few ugly slides in presentations. The most memorably ugly slides were by an undergrad, and they weren't that bad.
-I attended mostly solid talks. I didn't see a single truly bad talk.
-I saw some GREAT talks- really fabulous.
-You can pretty much always tell who is presenting that day and who isn't by what they're wearing.
-Presentations listed lots of people in the acknowledgments. I thought I had a lot of people to thank, and mine was one of the shorter ones.
-A few people put the acknowledgments at the beginning of the talk instead of the end.
-There were more citations on slides than I remembered seeing in the past.
-I don't think I saw a single talk run over time.
-The only thing worse than being scheduled at a bad time is being scheduled at a bad time that is the same time as someone famous (you know, famous for an ecologist).
-There were several obviously pregnant women and many infants & children around (with strollers, spouses, grandparents, daycare and/or baby carriers). I find this encouraging for a family-friendly future of ecology.

Overall, I was energized and inspired by the presentations I saw, and proud of ecologists for being able to communicate their research so clearly (in general) . It will probably take me an entire day to go through all of my notes, follow up on contacts, and catch up on email. I've got to digest and summarize some talks for a collaborator who wasn't there and do some thinking about what I've learned about my project. I didn't end up with any great leads on what to do post-PhD, but I was pleasantly surprised at how many people showed up for my presentation, and I gave out lots of cards. I spent time with several friends and acquaintances (from all over my past) and met many new people (even spoke some Ukenzagapese!). Somewhere in there I managed to do some dancing, go for a run, and come down with an unfortunate cold. I'm looking forward to resuming a normal schedule this week and looking forward to ESA next year!

On scientific posters

Last year I made a beautiful, awesome poster. This year, I have to figure out how to make a new, beautiful, awesome poster that looks different than the other one. The data were analyzed differently this year, but it didn't radically change our conclusions. I'm trying to make it look unique without spending too much time on it. It's kind of frustrating. I have to finish it this weekend.

Why am I presenting a very similar thing two years in a row? Because it's for two different audiences. This year I'm presenting it at a much more specific meeting where most people are working on related topics.

Speaking of posters, how do people feel about abstracts on posters? I have an opinion but I'd like to hear first what others think.

Happiness

Today has been a fantastic day. I am back at Small Friendly College to give a seminar. This comes at the end of a long string of deadlines in February. The way I've described it is that for the past two weeks I've been working uncomfortably close to the number of hours I work in the field, but without someone to cook and clean for me.

When I offered to give this talk, I imagined it as a great opportunity to talk about Best Project and teach some of the analyses in my presentation so that I'd come out with a more thorough understanding in the process. I'd imagined myself with slides done days in advance, fine-tuning the best way to explain things. So such thing.

Instead, I was still writing my talk on the way here, last night, and this morning. I only practiced the whole thing once. I was very, very nervous as I made the last few changes to my slides 20 minutes before the presentation.

But once I was on, I was on. I got an incredibly complimentary introduction from one of my former professors. He highlighted many of my accomplishments, my tenacity in getting the NSF GRF, and resourcefulness in applying for other funding. He is so proud of me, and it showed. And after that great introduction, I went on to give a fantastic presentation. I made people laugh, I talked about 3 different projects, and I ended with enough time for questions. I could hardly have had a friendlier audience, but my gosh it felt great.

I met with some current students, talked to some newly hired professors, had dinner with some senior professors, and enjoyed walking around campus. Tonight I drank wine and talked with my hosts (a faculty couple) and heard their perspectives on what's going on on campus and in the department. What a great place. I said it before (here, here, here, and here), but I'll say it again- I. Love. SFC.

February madness

There are so many things happening and so many things I need to do in the next week!
-write and submit two conference abstracts (first one due tomorrow. still analyzing data. eep!)
-write and submit a small grant proposal
-plan and launch major outreach project
-prepare and give a talk at SFC
Meanwhile, in my personal life:
-I've spent several days in the last two weeks away from Big City working with my friend Theo on the analyses for these abstracts.
-my friend and former labmate Mariyah will be in town for a week and is staying with us
-I simply MUST finish a photo book of our wedding before my groupon expires!
And now, back to the abstract.

Time to update that CV!

I'm giving a presentation in a few weeks and just got asked for a copy of my CV. Oh my. It turns out I haven't updated it for two years! Not that I have any publications to add (urgh), but I've got other things (outreach! presentations!). Time to get cracking.

Maybe posters aren't so bad

I presented a poster at the meeting last week, but unfortunately many people who I'd hoped would stop by were unable to for a variety of reasons. The advantage of a poster is that it's a complete presentation that can stand on its own without me presenting it. Like I said, I collected several business cards so I emailed my poster to all of these folks who didn't get to see it at the meeting.

I've already gotten feedback from ALL of the people I sent it to! One person collaborates with the person whose study I modeled mine after (let's call him Dr. Bigname), and forwarded my email to Dr. Bigname (who wasn't at the meeting). Dr. Bigname emailed me and said he thinks my study may be the best of its type in Africa! How's that for awesome?! He's forwarding it to Dr. Evenbigger.

As an aside, my poster printed with a minor graphical error that wasn't my fault. I pointed it out to the company who printed it and they offered to reprint it, but when I said that wasn't necessary, they sent me a coupon for 50% off my next poster!

Maybe posters aren't so bad after all.

Motivation from the meeting

I love the big ecology meeting and this year was no exception! I saw some great presentations, got new ideas, met interesting people, and caught up with friends. I talked with several people who have similar research interests and I'm likely to collaborate with one of them. I gave out and collected lots of cards. I learned that I don't want to do another poster for a while.

More than anything, though, it has inspired me to think about a conference presentation timeline for parts of my dissertation. I want to give a presentation at next year's meeting on the final results of the project I did a poster on this year, and maybe present a different piece of that research at a smaller conference earlier in the summer. It will help me to have these deadlines on my calendar.

What I'm bringing to the conference

Next week is the big ecology conference (are any of my readers going to be there?). I'm really excited about. I just wanted to take a moment to share a few items on my conference packing list and see if any readers have anything to add.

-Business cards. I have plenty of these already printed and I'm going to carry them around in my name tag holder.
-Highlighter. For highlighting the talks I want to go to in the printed program. This is the #1 most important time I need a highlighter in my life.
-Water bottle. It'd just be embarrassing to carry around a disposable bottle at an ecology conference.
-Distinctive ribbon. This is new on my list. I'm going to tie it to the tote bag they give me so I can tell it apart from the other 2,000 identical tote bags.
-Lightweight sweater/cardigan. It's going to be wicked hot outside but if they crank up the AC or have some temperature regulation problems, I don't want to be shivering.

I've been way out of touch with the blogosphere- does anyone have a blogger meetup planned? I look forward to seeing some of you very soon!

What do you use for making posters?

What software do you use to design posters? What do you like/dislike about that program? How does it compare to other programs you've used?
I've got a couple of poster presentations to make from scratch this summer and I'm wondering if I should use something other than Powerpoint.

Changing focus

I have mentioned a few times that I am changing some parts of my project (or really just changing a few projects in particular that collectively add up to my dissertation). I developed one large piece of it for my prelim proposal and submitted it for funding, but preliminary fieldwork convinced me that it is not worth the risk so I'm doing something else instead. With the shift in project focus, I have mostly eliminated much of Melody's area of research. I just realized this the other day while looking over my prelim presentation. I am really interested in her type of work but somehow the projects I am planning to work on now don't have that element. It makes me a little bit sad that my prelim project isn't going to work out, because it was going to be beautiful. Like, really really awesome. If only the critters would cooperate and the equipment were inexpensive! Anyways, I'll meet with Melody to discuss how to incorporate her area of expertise into my revised projects.

Speaking of shifting interests, I'm a little worried that Leo will remove himself from my committee since my project is now largely outside his realm of interest. But, after all of my adventures scheduling this committee meeting, Leo can't attend due to a family emergency. I'll have to catch up with him next week by myself and see what happens then. My meeting is tomorrow morning. I think I'm ready. I went over it with Herb this morning and he seemed to think it was fine. It's only an hour, and it can't run over

Dissertation progress

In preparation for my committee meeting this week I have really had to sit down and make decisions about which projects I want to do (or don't want to do). In December last year I was struck by the realization that there are so many projects that I could do at my field site based on my interests. This was liberating to me because I spent part of last semester struggling to find what I was excited about doing in the field. Then I just had to lay them all out (using FreeMind helped me conceptually organize my ideas) and decide which ones to pursue.

This week I will present my committee with a draft table of contents for my dissertation including chapter titles and a brief synopsis. Putting this together has really made me see how far I have come. I spent much of last year feeling like I was 'behind' because I didn't have any data yet. Now when I look at my table of contents I see that I have collected data for one chapter, one chapter will be a review, and one will be based on other forthcoming data that I don't have to collect. I already have what I need to write two of my five dissertation chapters. It was like I woke up one day and POOF! there is was. Ok, not really (since I spent 3 months in the field for some of that)- but that's how the realization felt. I have to collect data for just two more chapters and some side projects (in case one or more of the projects fail). Holy crap! That makes it seem like I'm making serious headway on this Ph.D. thing, which I didn't realize until about 2 weeks ago.

I actually have too many projects outlined at this point to fit in my dissertation. I sent Herb a rough draft of my table of contents with 9 chapters and he said I needed to relegate 3-4 of them to appendixes. But... you mean I can't keep them all? I can see how grad students can delay their completion by thinking they haven't done enough yet and that they need to collect more data. I can see myself falling into that trap. But as far as I'm concerned, this is an exciting problem to have. After all, too much is always enough. I'll have enough for a dissertation.

Done, done, and done!

Today I...
...bought tickets for my next trip
...ordered cameras for my field assistants
...gave a great presentation

Not a bad day. I'm very happy with how my presentation went. I was on. It might have helped that I had about half a beer before I started talking. There were some fantastic questions from the audience and I met some interesting people, including some children's authors. All in all a productive day.

I've still got a lot to do before I leave in 3 weeks. Just 3 weeks! The big things-
-send the short note someplace else after finishing revisions
-complete a general timeline for the rest of my fieldwork
-meet with my committe
-present at lab meeting
-nail down my methods for this project
-I think there is something else that I'm forgetting.

I'm excited about this next trip. I'll be gone for about 9 weeks, which isn't too long but long enough- I'm missing Jon's birthday and our first anniversary :-(  I'll return just in time for my cousin's graduation from SFC. Yay!

Committees... again

I originally wanted to have my committee meeting in mid-January. Then when that wasn't going to be possible, I wanted to have it last week at the end of January. Several people's schedules made that impossible, so now I have pushed the date to February 10 and am planning to leave for the field just two weeks later.

This meeting is important because I am no longer actively pursuing the high-risk project I defended in my prelims last spring. My committee felt that rather than develop and present a proposal for my entire dissertation that I should instead focus on a clear component of it that I could submit for funding. I tested some of the methods last summer, and I just don't think it's worth the risk. So, I've got to describe my new plan to my committee. Last year I presented them with a theoretical table of contents (of which the high-risk project was only one chapter), and this year I will do the same. I need to be sure that everyone is on the same page with the direction my dissertation is headed so that none of them feel excluded or push me to go in a different direction because they misunderstand the new project focus.

My committee meeting is only supposed to be an hour, but it's hard for me to imagine how it can be kept to that time. I suppose I will continue discussions with individual professors (which should be happening anyway) if we start to run overtime. Herb told me to prepare a short 10-15 minute presentation, but I suspect that the committee will ask me questions throughout the presentation, turning my 15 minutes into 45. I just want to be sure that they agree on my projects and the timeline for them.

Short notice

Friday morning I received an email asking if I could give a presentation.
On Tuesday.
To the people that fund my research.

Gah! It only has to be 5-10 minutes for a non-scientific audience, but still! As I've written before, it takes me a long time to figure out the best way to present something. Just because it's a short presentation doesn't mean it will be a breeze to prepare.

On the bright side, these people have already funded me, so it's not a hard sell. I just need to keep them excited about what I'm doing.

I've got half a dozen or more posts to finish or start writing, but the week just got away from me. I am hoping to get some of those thoughts out soon.

Presentation report

I think our presentation went well. I was seated next to the promient scientist giving the keynote. The talk was awesome. We talked right after. Of course ours wasn't as awesome (few decades less experience I think), but we did get people interested.

Where did this weekend go? It hardly felt like a weekend. At least this is a short week. I sure do have a lot to get done though!

Co-presenter anxiety

This weekend I'm giving a presentation with another person in my interdisciplinary cohort about the project we've been working on. It's going to be a large, mixed audience- some prominent scientists but mostly non-scientists who are enthusiasts about what we studied in our project. We're slated to present between two senior scientists, to an audience of about 100 people. It's a little intimidating.

Getting this presentation ready has taken more of my week than I expected it to, and my co-presenter is making me kinda anxious. I'm pretty sure we'll be great and people will love us, but he keeps bringing up all of the unknowns (What will the room be like? How big will our screen be? What if they mistake us for experts? What if someone asks us a question we can't answer?). I'm just trying to go with the flow. Our presentation is nearly final now, and we're practicing tomorrow evening. He's bringing his girlfriend over tonight and so we'll practice the presentation after dinner. I just want to have fun with this presentation and convince all these laypeople of the greatness of our project.