Soooo Long

Woah,

I'm done with research and I'm done with senior year. I'm actually done. There's a feeling I never thought I would experience.

With everything completely done, I honestly can't feel more overjoyed, relieved, and also sad at the same time. The last two years have been an amazing time, not only just with Seminar and Research, but also in so many other ways. I guess there's really nothing left to do but write this last post.

Research has been a pretty rewarding activity. I never thought that at the start of the year i would have a whole finance paper written. It's really taught me the value of hard work (and more importantly, of scheduling and consistent exertion). If it wasn't for the constant pressure of Mrs. Haag, I'm sure I would have fallen behind on research at some point down the line, but I'm really happy that I didn't.

The Capstone program has really drilled the importance of group work into me too. At the beginning of 11th grade, I honestly hated working in groups because most of the time it meant me doing all of the work. Communicating with other people more effectively, while also learning to be a lot less selfish helped a lot with that, and I'm a whole lot more enthusiastic about group projects now. That's a skill that's going to come in handy wherever I go: working through struggles with others is a daily part of college and life.

Looking back, Seminar and Research were entirely different beasts: research was so much more challenging and involved much more hard work. At the same time, though, I liked research so much more. At the start of the year, I was wondering if I liked finance enough. Now I know that I do. Being able to spend so much time on Finance-  a subject that, even though I spent a year on, still find as interesting as ever - has made me realize what I actually want to pursue in college. There's so much creativity and impact the subject can have upon others, and I know that I would love to study it.

For that, research has imparted a new focus for the next few years of my life. I know what I'm interested in, and I know how to pursue it.

Hopefully I have these same reflections four years when I'm writing a senior thesis a lot like I did this year in college.

For now,
Peace.

Presentation Weak

Hey Everyone,

This week is literally the final stretch for everything, and I can't wait to finish my presentations, and finally finish research. It's been a really great time, and I've definitely learned a lot.

Let's get right into the presentations. My first presentation on Friday was eh. Most of the material was there, but I still spoke too fast and had too many technical concepts up. I think the big problem was some of the material I decided to include in my slides. Basically, after talking to Mr. Molk, Mrs. Haag, and all the other wonderful teachers, I found out that a lot of the math I thought was important in the presentation really wasn't. So I took a lot of the math stuff out of my presentation (it's a lot more understandable now). Next, as I kind of suspected before, the tables for the multiple accuracy were way too complicated. I've substituted the tables for graphs instead. This both allows the audience to better understand what I'm talking about, and allows me to save time because I don't have to talk about the numbers that the tables produced in the graph. The last issue I had with my presentation on Friday was the lack of solid explanation for my methods, both in speech and on the slides.

Personally, I think I've fixed most of the mistakes I made on Friday. Saturday's presentation went MUCH better, and I now know the way that I should be explaining each slide and part of my research paper to other people. I have a few tweaks that I need to implement on my slides such as making certain bullet points more parallel, and clarifying certain figures, but for the most part, I'm feeling really confident about my presentation. When giving my actual presentation this Friday, I need to remember to speak very slowly and reiterate the definitions of certain key terms repeatedly. Even with a lot of the technical stuff removed from my presentation, it's still pretty hard to follow because of the esoteric nature of financial lingo.

Practice does make perfect, though, so for now, I'm working on the few critiques I got on Saturday (making sure I fully explain the initial drawbacks of market booms and citing one source), and I'm sure I'll be ready for Friday by the time by last practice presentation rolls around on Tuesday.

Cautiously Excited,
Akash

Two More Weeks FTW

THANK GOD,

College admissions are done, and now I don't have to worry about anything but research. That's still a lot to worry about though, so let me jump right in.

I'm going to be honest: I made a really bad presentation the first time. It was overly simplified, boring, and not really engaging. I hope I've fixed good a amount of that right now, but there's still a lot of improvement that needs to be done.

First and foremost, my slides were mostly pictures that were word associated with the title, not necessarily with exactly what I was speaking. Second, I barely had any words on my slides. That might be good for Seminar, but especially for a highly technical project like mine, it's almost completely unacceptable. Most of the people are going to have a hard time understanding what I'm saying anyways. Making the slides overly simplistic is going to confuse people. So, I've been adding a lot more animations and different slide formats to fix this problem. I've introduced some flow charts to make sure that the methods section is understood well, and I've included a lot more definitions in my literature review section.

In general, a research presentation is really different from a seminar presentation. A seminar presentation is basically a literature review section of the research presentation, but in my case, with much less technical information. That means in the Seminar presentation, I was able to get away with having lost of pictures and minimal words: because the subject matter didn't demand it as much. The purpose of Seminar was to introduce and explore an idea. The purpose of research is to introduce, explore, and discover something new, which requires a whole new level of understanding on the part of both the presenter and the audience. Because of that, it's important to ensure that the audience knows exactly what's going on, so that they can properly assess the quality of the research as well as the findings and conclusions. Therefore, having a lot of words is really important to make sure that the audience knows you know what your talking about and understands it too. This is especially true in really technical presentations like mine. If I don't explain what an IPO is in detail, the audience will never know what I'm going to be talking about later.

Because it is so essential that others understand my project and presentation, I'm going to mainly be presenting to my parents, and also my dogs, when my mom and dad are out of the house. It takes a lot of stress off. I'll roughly go through the script and make sure I touch on all of the points, and then film myself to make sure I'm not going too fast.

Signing Off,
Akash