TRAIN Scholar Evelyn Rivera Elias' Blog

  The ANAS conference last week was great and everyone there was pretty nice. I was worried it would be more cold and serious but some presenters were making jokes during their talks. I also didn't expect there to be a lot of paleontologists presenting but it made sense since the Natural history museum was mostly dinosaur exhibits, which me and Maya saw after the conference had ended. I think my presenting skills have gotten a lot better but I realized there were some gaps in my knowledge about the project when people started asking questions. This just means I'll just have to read up some more next semester!

 The poster for the ANAS conference has been printed and it looks great! Thought I wish it wasn't so thin when Josh showed me it I was very very careful to not wrinkle the poster or accidentally create a tear. Regardless, I think it's neat and I am looking forward to presenting it on Saturday.  Aside from that, I did my last final for the semester and passed! This made me super glad and has gotten rid of a lot of stress on my shoulders so now I'll just focus on getting the ANAS conference done and revising my rough draft.

  This week I got the okay from Josh to register for the ANAS conference as a co-presenter with Alex. I'm really looking forward to it as it'd be the first conference for me but hopefully not the last one. I was a bit nervous when Josh brought it up but my project has been based off of Alex's work from last semester and I've replicated it almost exactly except with my own stressor being the microplastics. Based on the readings that have been taken, it seems as if the microplastics are super stressful for the plants. I think the conference will be fun and I'm hoping to learn a lot from it!