Enjoy the VT!

Today was a great day. It seems that real, tangible things to do come in waves (no pun intended! ha!). The day after I go to the river, there's plenty to do. And today I learned how to test for Silicate levels in the water. Yesterday, however, I was at a loss. I completed a simple task to determine the surface area and volume of my shoal, and after that, I couldn't come up with much to do. Ahh, such is life.

Today we had our second official project event, this time a presentation. We all got together in a (windowless) seminar room to present our objectives, hypotheses, and research methods. I was a-ok with this whole idea until I noticed a visitor in the room. And this visitor had an interesting, urm, piece of cargo. It turns out that one of the professors of public speaking decided to come along to video tape our presentations and offer suggestions. This, combined with the other students and one of our REU sponsors, Dr. Andresscu, made the room a bit tense. The gig went down without a hitch, however. Except that we ran over by about 30 minutes. It's a bit grueling to listen to 2 1/2 hours of people trying to explain their analytical chemistry research projects. (There are only 2 biology students: the rest are chemistry or engineering. If you know me at all, you know how I feel about chemistry and engineering. ha!) Also, the professors offered immediate feedback to each of us when we finished. I suppose it's good to hear, but a bit of a buffer would always be appreciated. I was convinced to view the whole experience as positive, however, when the speech professor asked me on the way out if I had much experience with public speaking. My gut reaction: "oh snap. was I that bad?" But when I told her that I'm forced to get up and talk fairly regularly, her reply was encouraging. She said she could tell that I'm not a newbie--that's always a good sign!

Tomorrow we head to Burlington, Vermont to tour Ben and Jerry's, a water treatment plant, a wood gasification plant, and a composting system. And then I'm checking out the jazz festival that's going on all weekend--it should be great! I've heard good things about Burlington. And as one of the grad students in my lab says, I hope to enjoy "the VT." Hooray for upstate NY lingo!