Reflection #2 AU18: Academic

The event I attended was the Undergraduate Research Festival. I visited multiple speakers and poster board, but the one that stuck out to me was a project about DNA mapping. I attended this on November 1, at 11:30. It was held in the Ohio Union, and had a few different facets to it. One part was the posterboard presentation, where participants just simply held an expo and presented their research to those who attended. Another part was the Oral presentations, which was a 10 minute presentation about their research project in front of an audience. The third aspect of the festival was the 3- minute thesis competition, in which participants created a slide and presented their research in 3 minutes or less – in lay terms only. There are then winners of that competition. The part I attended was the poster presentations. In the room. there were a considerable amount of presentations from a large variety of disciplines. This varied from dance, to education, to STEM. What surprised me was STEM research was not the clear majority, which I think is a common misconception. Most people believe that the majority of research is done in Science and the like, and that it is all laboratory based. Although this is true for a lot of the posters I encountered, it is definitely not true for all of them. There were education, psychological, and a variety of human and nonhuman based research. This relates to the topic of International Affairs because the projects were interdisciplinary and often related to life on a global level. Although I didn’t specifically see any projects that took place overseas, I’m sure they exist. Many of the projects I did see have global implications to their conclusions, and don’t just affect people in their immediate vicinity. From this event, I gained a lot of knowledge. Personally, I learned that research is pretty specific and that these students didn’t just have a general idea that they sought information about, they had a very specific hypothesis and a very specific way to research it. Professionally and academically, I learned that I would never want to do laboratory research, as it is incredibly tedious and although interesting information, pretty boring outcomes (to me). I think it would be a lot more fun to do field research, but would probably only participate if it fell on my lap, and probably wouldn’t seek it out. It seems like too big a time commitment. To be honest, I didn’t really learn much because of the IA community event where the research people came and spoke to us about research. The only thing I really learned was how crazy some people are for researching such tedious things.

I don’t have many questions about the event. The research the most stood out to me was a posterboard about genome and DNA mapping in amphibians that are almost identical, but this research proves they are not genetically identical, and that although they share many physical attributes, they differ, just slightly, in how they react to specific medications. This has pretty cool human implications, as it can affect cancer research in explaining how different people react to different medications.