In my mind, the URC is like a very large-scale science fair. I hope someone brings a paper-mache volcano.

When I signed up for the Undergraduate Research Conference in March, I hadn't planned on having to restart my thesis. I also assumed that a poster presentation would be a fairly straightforward thing, which is why I decided to do a poster presentation AND a thesis reading. This may have been an error in judgment. But, there wasn't much I could do about it.

Last Thursday I very sleep-deprivingly drove to every nearby place that would print a 32x40 semi-gloss professional poster. Due to my tiny department of 35 students and three professors, I was in charge of my own poster. Conveniently, UNH offers these printing services, but they said they needed a 5-7 day turnaround time. This was the 5-7 day turnaround deadline before the URC, and I had nothing to give them. Worried, I went to Kinko's and Staples to get quotes. For the convenience of approximately a 2 hour turnaround time, I would pay nearly three times as much. I had planned on working on my poster the week I got back from spring break. I didn't even start rewriting until two weeks ago.

This weekend I started working on my poster. I sent it to print an hour ago.

To be honest, the nature of my project is that it is quite simply not accessible to everyone. There aren't a lot of pictures which are applicable to native and adopted locative prefixes. It requires a lot of very wordy explanation. There is no way to make this "user-friendly". I tried, believe me. It was a stretch to come up with two graphs.

Helpfully, the last time I used Powerpoint for ANYTHING was middle school, and we all had to make a metaslide that showed we knew how to use powerpoint. I had no idea how to make a poster using it... but there is no time for a learning curve. Luckily for me, someone compiled a How-To. Beverly, my old and rather crotchety computer, decided that this was a good time to let Powerpoint crash every 20 minutes or so. This was frustrating.

But, Shelly approved of my final poster draft while I was in class this afternoon. I ran to get it printed through UNH's copy center, which apparently is three days ahead of schedule and not costing me $92.25 for 32x40 inches of semi-shiny paper with things printed on it. So this is all going very well; much better than anticipated, really.