This is the last slide from the presentation I gave about my honors thesis at the Anadarko symposium a week and a half ago. It's a basic summary of my findings. The numbers are 87Sr/86Sr ratios from different sources in the Croatan National Forest. None of them are as high as the peat in the pocosin of the forest, which means that none of them are the source of the high ratios. We are hypothesizing that the source may be upwelling ground water that has been in contact with the basement rocks a couple thousand feet below the forest, or it may be deposition of atmospheric dust.
The presentation went really well. I did a practice run for my advisor and a few other students the day before, which gave me a good idea of what I needed to change (including making a lot of changes to my slide show) and what I wanted to say. My advisor said that he was pleasantly surprised because I'm such a mellow person that he didn't think I would be very animated when I was talking. If I can just get past the first few introductory sentences I usually get in the zone and I forget that I'm talking to a room full of people. I got a lot of compliments from people saying I seemed very calm and not at all nervous, especially since at one point in the middle of my presentation there were technical issues with the connection from the computer to the screen (which was ironic because the day before my advisor had promised that would not happen), and it didn't really faze me.
Ryan was really great to spend the entire day with the kids so I could be there for the entire symposium. It was interesting to see people's posters and presentations and learn about what other students have been working on, and I also enjoyed talking to professors and students who I haven't talked to for a while.
Giving the presentation helped me organize my thoughts more coherently, so after I had given the presentation I was able to go back to my thesis and fix a lot of the things I had felt uneasy about with my discussion section. I submitted the final draft on Friday, so it's all done! It's interesting to think how a couple of years ago I couldn't imagine myself writing a thesis, but it all happened gradually over the last couple of years.
Tomorrow is my last final, and after that I will be completely done! It still hasn't really registered that the end is finally here.
No comments:
Post a Comment