Presentation Time - Explaining the details, with very few details.

When participating in Mid-SURE, as required by the EnSURE program as well as others, the student presenters were asked to evaluate 4 other posters outside of their presentation time blocks. The goal was to to give everyone a chance to present their research and to fill up the hour long period with constant talking. Due to the size of the event, there was many different science fields showing their research such as some social science, biology, microbiology, all of the engineering disciplines, etc. Therefore, it was not surprising to be asked to evaluate a poster from a science discipline that was different from your own. It was however, challenging.

If there is one thing that always confuses me about the science world is criticism from groups with little to no understanding of your topic of research or study. I understand the importance of collaboration and how cool it is to learn some new things in different areas. However, I have a hard time evaluating the effectiveness of ...lets say research on flies and their reactions to spiders if I have no background in the topic. Sure, I can learn some information from the presentation I might not be familiar with, but as far as grading it to see how well the research project was conducted .... it is not very easy for me to form an opinion let alone an accurate one considering my background is not biology.( I did have to evaluate a presentation on flies and their reaction to spiders as one of my four evaluations. Not easy for a mechanical.) 

Another main difficultly in judging someones research, besides lack in background knowledge, is visualizing the big picture surrounding the research and its role. It can be difficult in your own field, let alone a field that is unfamiliar. Part of the research I completed this summer was creating a website that hosts a user manual for a software particular to the cardiovascular field. While the website seems simple (it really is), it is actually very significant to the field. I published another method of using the software that other researchers can not only use, but modify and build upon. This big picture, being the important part of my presentation, was really difficult to describe to those evaluating me. It wasn't hard for me to explain, but because of their background I felt they got caught up in the wrong details. Thus, it made it hard for them to understand how the project I completed fits in the cardiovascular field. 

After the event we received the evaluations written by the evaluators and I was shocked by my results. I thought that my project was fairly straight forward. The areas where I was the most surprised were those related to that big picture idea I mentioned. One of the judges gave me a 1 out of 5 (5 being the best) in my explanation of future works and contributions. This was confusing because I know I talked for about 10 minutes as well as having my poster mention that the website will be used in classes at MSU. I also mentioned how they are hoping to add a discussion forum on the site or link it to one so that researchers that use the software can share their implementation ideas more easily. However, like I mentioned before I think the reason behind the score isn't that I mentioned it or not, its the amount of background understanding of the audience and trying to absorb everything about the topic in order to make a judgment.  

Not all my scores were bad, most were average or above. I personally felt I did better, and was disappointed that it wasn't reflected. But I took my scores with a grain of salt. I concluded that for a decent amount of understanding of anything, a poster and short presentation just wasn't going to cut it.