Doing it right ways....

So its Family weekend at Loyola College, the time when kids go home or have their parents spoil the hell out of them like they were back home. That, or get high school siblings drunk. My folks are here, or at least in a hotel for now. All I know is that I have to be up at school time on the weekend for some awards processional. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm not too big on awards. Seems that America loves to pat itself on the back for everything they do. the average celebrity probably earns about 20 awards a year. In the academic world, it seems even a sneeze is enough to get you a certificate or something. Its as if doing anything is not justifiable without a piece of paper and random applause from an audience just trying to be polite to accompany it.

Now, I don't want to sound as if I'm ungrateful. I simply don't see the need. My award is for the research I did during the summer, but to me, that was just work. Nothing special. Maybe it will lead to something great, but for now there are far more people who have done far more important things than me who aren't getting any sort of recognition at all. The respect of my peers and family is all I really need, and even if I didn't have that, the feeling of a job well done works just fine.

Speaking of research, today was the Hauber poster presentation. I've done these poster things quite a few times during high school, and it was always the same; spend over two hours printing graphs and huge paragraphs of text that no one usually reads, making sure its all nice and neat. Spend a few hours explaining your project to bewildered parents and professors that scare the crap out of you. Finish it all up, and after a year no one remembers. I was relieved then when I was told not to stress out with this one; keep the thign simple, and back it up with words is what they told me. Not to mention that computer science research doesn't exactly include large amounts of charts and graphs. The final product consisted of three pages glued to poster board. Not much but it would get the job done.

Apparently though, quite a few students and professors were taken back at just how poor it looked. Here they were spending all their time making theirs look presentable, and I walk in with an embarrassment of a poster. I'll admit that I could have put some more effort into the glueing and scissoring. But the simplistic design was deliberate. When people look at these things, they don't want to be staring at 9 paragraphs at 12 point font from the stuffy lab report you wrote for your professors to read. They won't understand, or they'll get bored real quick. Neither will they care for some fucked up graph you drew. Its all Greek to them. My page of code and two diagrams didn't look like much, but it was all I needed (along with my knowledge) to explain everything the audience could possibly want to know about my project. No one walked away from me confused, and some even asked more specific questions to get a better understanding of things. Mission complete if you ask me.