Presenting at a Virtual Research Symposium
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused many research conferences to be postponed or cancelled. I thought I would have to wait until the fall to present my research poster. However, a unique opportunity presented itself that semester: UNLV’s Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) held its first virtual research symposium. I was ecstatic that I wouldn’t have to wait until October to share the work we did in the Interactive Measurement Group.
My poster teammates, Matthew Helm and Lindsay Denecker, and I eagerly submitted our abstract to the symposium and waited anxiously for an email from OUR. I was delighted when we got accepted to present. However, we weren’t quite prepared for a virtual presentation. Moreover, we couldn’t work together in person as the university was closed and we were practicing social distancing.
The necessary materials we needed to submit to the symposium included a PDF of our poster (piece of cake, we made this months ago) and a 6-minute YouTube video presentation. That would require more time, effort, and excellent communication between my poster team and I. How would we record our presentation? Who would write the script? Who would do the voiceover? These were just some of the questions we asked ourselves.
We only had a week to coordinate and execute our presentation, so we needed to answer our own questions quickly. We would record our presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint using a slideshow we made during our lab meetings in 2019. The script would be adapted from the research paper we spent a whole semester writing. We would all contribute to the voiceover, alternating our voices between slides. We had our PowerPoint slides and script ready, it was time to tackle the voice recordings.
Recording voice overs presented challenges I wasn’t expecting. It was difficult to remain within the time limit; I had to determine which parts of our research to exclude. It was time consuming; I had to rerecord my slides many times due to background noises or mistakes in my narration. My teammates experienced those struggles as well. After multiple rounds of sending the slides back and forth to Matthew and Lindsay, we reached our goal: a 6-minute-long presentation with clear recordings. Matthew converted the slides into a YouTube video and submitted our final materials with some time to spare.
Our work was up for display and open to comments for a week on OUR’s website. Somebody commented on our presentation asking us several questions about our research, which made the experience more interactive. The cherry on the top came at the end of the week when we were awarded with Best Poster Presentation in Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences. All of our hard work paid off at the end. You can still find our virtual presentation.
I highly recommend presenting your projects at virtual events if you get the chance. The experience will challenge you to adapt to a new format of conferences and allow you to share your work at a safe distance while still being able to interact with others.
Jelsy has been a member of the Interactive Measurement Group since Fall 2018. During her time in lab, she has co-authored a research poster on the perceived social intelligence of robots and has taken on numerous leadership roles. She is majoring in psychology and minoring in biology and hopes to graduate in the Spring of 2021.