Surprise surprise

Yes thats a sun and a tree and rainbow colors

on my poster.
And yeah that's second place...this story is ridiculous

So just as a bit of background, the whole reason I designed a poster was because I wanted a way to get a free conference fee and save myself some $. I realized when I did it, that I not only am semi-slow in visual design, but also that the ideas I was presenting seemed so obvious. So I basically designed this poster just to get the job done and hope that I got a free conference fee. I never thought beyond that....I also didn't put my advisors names on the poster because I didn't want to embarrass them by naming them in this design. I was really hoping that I could just keep a low profile and hide my poster in a corner somewhere.

Turns out there were only three of us with posters, so there would be no hiding. The other two of course were presenting PhD work, one on bee migration, and another on sheep and arsenic pollution. Although I was a bit surprised that there were so few of us, I got through the first day of the conference feeling pretty good, staying under the radar, meeting some of the people that I really wanted to talk to, and feeling really glad that I came. Well, at the end of the first day of the conference, the chair of the conference came up to me and said, "So you're Elizabeth, you designed a poster." Okay, so I guess I won't be avoiding this. After chastising me for not naming my advisors, he paid the poster some nice compliments, and then waved over four more of the conference chairs. One of them said, "Where did you get that diagram from with the tree?" ha ha ha, Umm from my third grade toolbox.

Tanira (conf director) also decided that he wanted to squeeze in a time for us each to present our poster in the style of Thesis in a Minute (a competition that they have here I guess). So much for staying under the radar. In one minute I decided the best approach was to go with the ol "I am but a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants" proverb. I also spoke in a bit of Maori, which really had me nervous, but I got it done.

After the second day, I realized, "Hey wait, if there are only three of us, we are all going to win a prize in the competition" which had me in stitches. So I won 2nd place, and $500 for this poster (bee lady got first which is cool, cause who doesn't love bees). As you can imagine, I'm very excited that I attended this conference, and not just for the hilarity of this poster situation, but the conference content was all basically an affirmation of my research and I got to meet a lot of people that I've been trying to track down for months.

And now with that, I'm off to Samoa on Tuesday.