A Virtual SASES Meeting

As this semester starts, still different than any other college semester I’ve had, I reflect on the successes of last semester. A big success that I was able to have was to not only attend the SASES Annual Meeting, but participate and win first place in the Internship Poster Competition. This meeting looked a little different than the normal meeting as it was all virtual, and with the virtual platform comes a lot of challenges to be overcome. The largest issue faced as always is simply that technology will always have failures, it is never perfect. We had connectivity issues, platform issues, and scheduling issues that all had to be overcome. The greatest challenge I had to overcome personally was scheduling issues. There were people participating and judging this competition from multiple different time zones, and the competition dates were moved to be during the academic week. These two factors made it difficult to participate fully while also trying to go to class. In addition, the judges of my competition decided that they needed face to face time with the top 5 contestants in order to properly judge the competition instead of just looking at a poster. All the times offered to us contestants were during my class times, so, yet again we had to do some problem solving. I ended up being able to schedule a seperate time to meet with the judges and had such a wonderful experience speaking with them, despite the fact that it was online instead of in person. Overall, the competition was not a normal experience, but I appreciate the opportunity I had to still participate in it, and the hard work everyone put in to make the virtual experience go as smoothly as possible.