Saket Vora

Tomorrow is the MERIT Fair, the last day of the REU program. All the groups will give a presentation on what they have done for the past 10 weeks. We only get 3 or 4 minutes to speak, so it won’t be too in depth. Konstantin and I are slated to go #12 in line. Since it starts at 9am tomorrow, everyone is gonna be sleeping by the time we hit the stage. Afterward we will go stand by our poster and be there to help answer questions of anyone who comes by. I want to also walk around and see what other people have done too. At around 12pm there will be a nice lunch served, and the 1st and 2nd place winners of the Fair will be announced. Though it would be nice to ‘medal’, I’m not too concerned about it. There are so many differences between how all the teams operated this year; some students worked on novel projects, some students continued existing projects, some students worked virtually alone, some students worked directly with a few graduate students.

Kristy and Michelle have their presentations tomorrow as well, after which they will be joined us for lunch in the Grand Ballroom of the Stamp Student Union, where the MERIT Fair will be held. For the past few days in the lab I’ve been doing some other investigation for Todd, looking at digital inverter chips, as well as help Michelle and Kristy with anything they need for their poster, paper, and powerpoints. We all went into one of the conference rooms at IREAP and practiced our talks.

I’ll do some packing tomorrow to save time Saturday morning, but other than that I’m just feeling a bit tired now. It has been a long hard past two weeks. I’m looking forward to being home, but it has been a great experience here at College Park this summer.