By Matt Dooley, Forum editor
Senior Scholar’s Day, held on April 25, is an annual event giving seniors the opportunity to present their research to an audience of peers and other interested students. “It has been going on for 30 years,” remarked Tish Showers, an administrative assistant at the Career Development Center and organizer of the event.
“[Senior Scholar’s day] is a day when seniors and occasion- ally a few juniors have the opportunity to present the projects they have been working on,” Showers said. “Whether it be something scholarly, research and we also have music and arts students who are technically participants of the day.”
The event had presentations that ranged from the sciences to the theatrics. The day began around 12 p.m. with an early reception before the presentations began. The event took place in Degenstein Campus Center and Cunningham Cen- ter for Music and Arts.
Oral presentations were done in Shearer and Weber Dining Rooms on a rotating schedule as each group would only need 20 minutes to do their presentations. Physical presentations, where the student needed to hang up a poster, were done in Mellon Lounge.
“I imagine it has to do more with the kind of work that they did,” Showers said. “More students are more likely to post their findings on the poster and do a little presentation out [in Mellon Lounge]. It does not mean they hang the poster and that is it. They stay with their poster and answer questions of their peers and staff.”
As Showers said, “The whole day goes from noon to around six. This has grown a little bit over the last few years. In the past it was over by five because we only had two sets of poster presentations. But we had so many more students sign upforitsowehadtoaddathird poster session. So, there is a session at 12 p.m., 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. and it is over at 6 p.m.”
At different intervals during the day, students would set up their presentations in Mellon Lounge. Lined down the center were grey boards the students would attach their research to.
Shannon Kinney, a senior neuroscience major, said,“ It is pretty similar to what we expected. We had to come in the past for lower level biology courses [that] require you to come and listen to different presentations. So it is pretty similar to what we have seen in the past.”
Senior neuroscience major Olivia Souder continued, “We have presented to probably 10 different groups of people. So it has been a lot of people, a lot of traffic. It has been pret- ty much what we expected…. It’s been fun.”
When describing present- ing at the fair, senior Noah Diaz-Portalatin said, “The day was pretty fun. I was able to talk about my research, which we’ve been working on all year, to all types of people: students of different years and majors and faculty from different departments.”
