Dooms Day!

After staying up until 12:30 am last night (and then being woken up at 2:30 am) to put the finishing touches on my presentation for AFS, I woke up at 6:30 am to load my power point onto the computer.  I then milled around until 8:00 am and went to the room were the Marine Ecology section would be located.  There were two presenters before me that presented very well, one talk was on monkfish, and the other was on flounder.

The whole time I was waiting in the room for my presentation to start my heart was definitely pounding as I had never presented my research before and had never given any presentation in a setting such as a national meeting.  My talk started at 8:40 am, and overall went pretty well.  I feel like I stumbled around in some places and was maybe a little vague in others but for the most part I felt pretty comfortable talking about my research.  To be honest I was probably nervous for nothing.  At the present time I really do not have enough data to do any in depth analysis so most of what I presented on was fairly basic and uncomplicated.  I finished my talk two minutes early which left plenty of time for question but alas there were none, which was disappointing as I was really hoping for some comments and suggestions.

Most of the people I talked to afterward said I did really well although I did talk kind of fast, which I kind of expected to be the situation.  Now that I am through with my talk it really feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I look forward to attending more talks tomorrow particularly a few from the shad and river herring symposium that are very similar to my project and utilized otolith microchemistry.

I will probably have a more in depth post concerning some of the more interesting talks after the conference is finished but until that time if something interesting happens I will try and make a short post.