Carlota Bonnet
Florida Collegiate Honors Council Conference 2017
This was the second conference I attended with Santa Fe College's Honors Program. The event was held at the Embassy Suites (Hilton) Hotel. There were many conference rooms, and the student representatives were friendly and tried their best to make the evenings enjoyable. Santa Fe had 8 students at the conference: three were winners of the writing competition, and the others were presenting research. I presented two projects: my research on the water crisis in the Ivory Coast (that you can find here), and my presentation on Pascal's Triangle (found here).
In my previous conference, I enjoyed the Q&A sessions almost as much as the presentations; here, however, the presentations were often too long, restricting the time allowed for follow-up questions. In one case, a student wasn't even able to present since the session ran out of time.
I attended all the sessions Santa Fe College students were presenting in. An interesting subject was on drones in firefighting. This group was doing research to implement drones in firefighting, in order to reduce casualties of victims and responders. The drone still was on the first stages of development, but the ideas were great. My fellow Santa Fe student, Jessica Troches, presented her research on Body Identity Integrity Disorder (or BIID). This presentation was about a topic I had never heard about before. It explained what BIID is, and what impacts it has on the patients, their doctors, and society in general. Four other Santa Fe students presented on the Venezuelan crisis. Since I am from Venezuela, this topic was really important to me. I think it is important for us, Venezuelans, to do as much as we can to explain the situation our country is suffering from. This presentation was well documented, objective, and informative.
As stated before, I had two presentations: one on Pascal's triangle, and one on the water crisis in the Ivory Coast. After my presentation on Pascal's Triangle, a woman told me she had liked our presentation because it was easy to understand. The man sitting next to her informed me that she was an English professor. I was glad she liked our presentation, as our main goal had been to make it as accessible as possible.
In future conferences, I would like to find ways to include the audience, in order to create a more open and discussion-based environment, instead of a "lecture" style presentation.
