Creating my poster for the Undergraduate Research & Artistry Day (URAD) was a great learning experience for me that was also a lot of fun. Since I am very hands-on person and love to be creative, this was an interesting way to combine my new gained research knowledge with my creative skills. I already started working on my poster back in early February. This gave me enough time to implement everything I needed and made me focus more on my research process later on.
The most exciting part about my poster was to pick the finished product up from Media Services. Unfortunately, there were some graphical issues but they were not too severe. This was a little disappointing but overall it showed what I wanted to present. I had to put my poster in print a little earlier than everybody else because of my participation at NCUR, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.
Spending 3 days at this conference in Kentucky was my first real experience at a research conference. This definitely helped me to develop presenting skills and prepared me well for the upcoming URAD. I received lots of positive feedback about my poster and the research which made me feel even more excited about the upcoming event. Because of this “pre-training” I feel less nervous about URAD and look forward to a successful and inspiring day. I am a little nervous about the judges but I am sure that I will be fine as long as I do what I did at NCUR. I am the most excited for showing everybody my poster that I am very proud of.
Maria Senf's Research Lab 