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Students Shine at TRIUMF Summer Symposium

14 August 2009

On Wednesday, August 12, sixteen co-op and summer students participated in the 9th Annual TRIUMF Summer Student Symposium. The Symposium is an initiative designed to develop students' presentation and public speaking skills--skills which students will draw heavily on in the future when presenting their research at poster sessions, conferences, and lectures. It also provides a great opportunity for students to share with and learn from their peers and receive constructive feedback from the panel of judges. 

As a lead-up to the Symposium, TRIUMF hosted a Presentation Skills Workshop, presented by Desiree Mou from the UBC Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth (TAG). The workshop was open to all co-op and summer students working at the lab and introduced topics such as planning and organizing an effective presentation and becoming aware of elements that contribute to effective presentation delivery, like knowing your audience, organizing content, and use of visual aids.

 

Workshop

Above: Desiree Mou (front) instructs TRIUMF summer students on key presentation skills.

With the skills learned at the Presentation Skills Workshop in hand, the students who signed up to present at the Symposium each had 12 minutes to explain the research they conducted at the lab over the summer to a panel of judges. This year, Marcello Pavan, Jennifer Kaban, and John Behr had the privilege of judging the presentations. After presenting, each student had 3 minutes to field questions from the judges and their peers. Although many students expressed a fear of "Question Period" at the Presentation Skills Workshop, all who presented were well-prepared for the questions that came their way and displayed a sound and well-rounded understanding of the many dimensions of their research.

Symposium"With the quality of presentations so high, judging was very difficult, which speaks to the tremendous talent of all our summer students," remarked Marcello. At the end of the day, Rachel Ashley, a summer student from the University of Liverpool, England, was selected as the overall winner by the panel of judges and she is invited to attend the 2010 Winter Particle and Nuclear Physics Conference in Banff, Alberta, to present her research.

Rachel talked about the work she has been doing on the SHARC (Silicon Highly-segmented Array for Reactions and Coulex) detector--a collaboration between a handful of Canadian, British, and American institutions. "It was definitely a useful experience," said Rachel of participating in the Symposium. "It was good practice and a good test of my understanding of the project I'm working on. It was also very interesting to hear about the other students' work at TRIUMF."

Honourable mentions went out to Carolyn Kierans, Olivier Theriault, and Aaron Petkau, each of whom will receive a gift certificate of their choice.

Congratulations to Rachel, Carolyn, Olivier, and Aaron, and best of luck to all the summer students in their studies next year.

Above: Rachel Ashley, winner of
this year's TRIUMF Summer
Student Symposium.

 

-- Meghan Magee, Communications Assistant