Brightly colored, highly illustrated and detailed posters covered the walls. Last Friday in the spacious Live Oak Pavilion more than forty graduate students gathered to show off their research.
The posters read like electrical engineering diagrams in a foreign language, but they were well designed and the grad students who created them were always within earshot to explain their work. No matter how little you understood, they kept trying to relate the information to what a student in another field could understand, most of the time it worked.
“We wanted to bring graduate students together to represent their college, and to acknowledge researchers hard work being done here at FAU,” said Chip Day, the Information Coordinator for the Agency of Graduate Concerns.
FAU currently enrolls over a thousand graduate students in a hundred fields. The University is in the process of becoming one of the top research schools in the state of Florida.
“We want FAU to be known as a tier one research university,” stated Director Ram Chandrasekhar from the AGC in his opening speech to the crowd.
The main organizers of the event, Chip Day and President Zuzana Zajickova of the Graduate Student Association had a specific goal in mind for this event. Day said, “We wanted to open up lines of communication between usually isolated departments and colleges.”
The symposium was held in two separate rooms, one contained the science related projects, and the other was a grouping of all other fields that was labeled multi-disciplinary.
While the event ended up being mainly a science crowd, Chandrasekhar said, “We encourage all departments to get involved.”
The opening speech by Chandrasekhar was followed by the Poster Session where graduate students competed with each other in front of the panel of judges. The judges ranged from Dr. Frain from the Education department to Dr. Gary Perry Associate Dean and professor of Neuroscience.
The first place winners of the session, Mikki McComb for science, and Abu Asaduzzaman for the multi-discipline section received $100 gift certificates for Barnes and Noble. Second place winners were given $50, and third got $25.
Chandrasekhar said, “We want to solidify this as an annual event.” The AGC’s main goal is to bring together research from all fields. Several graduate departments were not at the event presenting work.
To learn how to get your department involved next year contact Chip Day at the Agency for Graduate Concerns: (561) 297-1170 or online at www.agc.fau.edu.
