Symposium Response

Hi,

Sorry this is late!

I enjoyed our portion of the symposium. I thought it was really interesting to get a deeper look into everyone else's topics, especially since these powerpoints were more in-depth than the e-posters we previously did. I think everyone did a good job, and it was fun to answer questions about my project because it meant that people were actually interested in the topic. The hour and fifteen minutes went by really quickly. Though having more people would have been cool, I think we had a pretty good amount of people wander through. I know Laura said that someone brought up a point about her project that she was going to use in her paper, so clearly it was beneficial to have such an interactive presentation.

The session I sat in on was not quite so interesting. I know this is echoing what we talked about in class, but while the topics of the papers were interesting, listening to them being read was not. The moderator also kept prodding the audience to ask more questions and prolonged what was already a kind of painful experience. The group of three presenters did try to engage the audience, which was good, and I think that if more of that happened it would not have been so boring. The symposium could be more successful if it was more of a showcase of what each class did over the semester. I don't know anything about any of the other UW classes so it would be interesting if each class had a presentation about their topic and what they did and the topics that people wrote about (kind of like what we did...).

I hope this is sufficient. I had a genuinely good time at our session.

Back to my children's lit paper about death in Harry Potter...