I ran home to grab my gaming system so we could have something to do at night while the rest of the team was having breakfast. -Jose
There were posters from middle schoolers doing some pretty cute experiments. There was one looking into the myth of the dumb blonde with the conclusion that blondes are actually smarter. -Jessica
I learned so much! At GSA, most some of the talks went over my head… I had trouble really understanding the point of many lectures. Not because they had no point, but simply because I’m an undergraduate student with a degree in environmental science, not geology. At IAS, many of the talks were geared towards the layman. I came away feeling very positively about what I had learned. -Bobbi
My favorite part was the poster session, I think it was really cool how well-represented UNI was at IAS this weekend. The BETA team and the other space grant students had plenty of posters to share with the community and it was cool that we had so much research to report on. A lot of people were very interested in our project so that was encouraging too! I believe that the conference added to my confidence in presenting research! -Carissa
My favorite part of the day was presenting and seeing other people’s research topics. This conference incorporates all fields of science and brings people together under the huge umbrella of science. It was great to talk to fellow colleagues and see the different areas of research that people are interested in. I went into this conference with an open mind to see and learn from people from all areas of science. -Steven
Our presentation went very well, and we had a lot of people who recognized that scientists in the past were trying to discover what we’re discovering, now, fifty years ago! [My favorite part was] presenting and giving our website address to various people who we had talked to, so that they could keep with us on our research. It was last my conference for my undergraduate career, and I really wanted to present one last time with the group!
-Brittnie
The poster session went really well. A lot of people were interested in hearing about our research and we did a good job of explaining our goals and progress thus far. I wanted to get more practice in presenting research to large groups of people from different scientific backgrounds. It gave me more confidence with presenting and explaining our research to other people. Though we have done this a good number of times at this point, it’s always good to get more practice. -Katie
So many posters! There was really a good collection of all kinds of science research presented at the conference. Biology, physics, chemistry, geology! I think that this is why many of the lectures and posters were easy for me to understand. At the chemistry conference, they had no reason to suspect non-chemists would attend. Here, people had to tailor their presentations under the assumption that perhaps a biologist would be at their talk about geomorphological features in Southwest Iowa... I was much better at speaking this time! -Bobbi
The poster session was very successful. We had 4 posters and each was visited and from what I heard people were curious about the project and were excited to see more as it came along. This research is really Iowa focused. It was important to bring to a major Iowa science conference to really get the word out about BETA to other Iowans. Plus we thought it would be a receptive crowd and it was. The poster session continued to help my ability to communicate, but in regards to my major, there was a teaching session with talks about science teaching in Iowa which was awesome to attend. -Jessica
We went to present our research to the scientific community in Iowa. At the beginning of the poster presentation I was a little nervous, but as the time went on I was able to inform the audience about the actinometry study. Jessica and I eventually divided the poster into two parts, I presented the background and procedure and explained lamp performance. -Jose
The dinner that they fed us was so fancy that us college students didn’t really know what we were eating! But it was fun to try knew things and to accidentally eat dessert first because I didn’t realize that it was dessert! Oops! -Carissa
Then there was dinner, in which everyone was turned off by whatever that cornbread-mushroom-goat cheese appetizer was. -Bobbi
During the banquet dinner on Friday, we had an appetizer that looked like a dish you would see on the show Chopped and no one else at the table liked it except me. -Jessica
The Pluto talk! It’s so fascinating how geologic processes take place on other worlds. It’s crazy, the things we could never predict. How Pluto’s crust is made of frozen nitrogen ice. And how Pluto’s mountains are made of frozen water, floating on oceans of frozen nitrogen. And how the nitrogen ice acts as a very viscous fluid, and can flow from valleys, into a great ocean… of ice. Also, the cryovolcano they found! It’s so curious. Here, earth’s crust is made of rock, and volcanoes erupt liquid rock. For Pluto, who has a crust made of ice, the volcanoes erupt a slurry of ice! It’s so weird, but absolutely wonderful and curious. -Bobbi
THE KEYNOTE! Dr. Oliver White presented some of the data that has been analyzed by NASA from Pluto. My mind was blown and I had to pick my jaw off the floor after the presentation. We also had 3D glasses to get a different perspective of the images published of the landscape. Seeing the depths of the features was unreal. -Jessica
The Pluto talk was great. It was really interesting how our ideas of what Pluto would be like were completely overturned by a single fly-by. Pluto has so many interesting geological features (ice mountains!) and I’m excited to see what new information comes outs about it in the future. The 3D images of Pluto basically made my night. I loved getting to wear old paper 3D glasses. It brought back some great memories of watching certain movies when I was little. -Katie
Afterwards we went to one of the sketchiest hotels I have ever stayed in. You tried, Baymont. You tried. -Katie
On the way back, Bobbi almost killed me! Let me explain. She was using buttons that controlled the automatic doors to our van so I could get my bag from the back. Well, she opened the doors just fine, but then as I’m about to get my bag, I don’t know what happened but all of sudden, I noticed the back door was going to hit me. I was like, “the doors are closing!” Then, Bobbi hit the button to make the door open. I’m just glad I wasn’t crushed by the door. I never thought the automatic doors of a van could be so dangerous! -Steven
The van I drove had automatic-open doors, and I got trigger happy. I almost crushed Steven with the trunk door because I was too excited about shutting it. Sorry, Steven :(
-Bobbi