Student Symposium Day

I didn't have classes today because it was Student Symposium Day.  Basically the day was devoted to students giving presentations on research they've done or manuscripts they've written.  A poster session occurred in the morning and then Allison Carr '05 gave the Plenary Talk.  The afternoon consisted of oral presentation sessions.

Allison Carr's speech was called "Room to Fail."  She discussed our idea of "failure" and what it means "to fail."  In today's society, we consider failure the opposite of success and failure is the absence of success.  Carr wants us to reconsider "failure" and not let failure become our isolation.  She created the Failure Project where people can post their failures; it's an archive of failures.  She hopes to keep working on it and hopes it takes off.  She ended her speech by saying, in the future, Carr hopes failure will be linked with wonder.

I was only able to go to one of the oral presentations, and the one I went to was fantastic.  I heard from four Creative Writing majors' manuscripts (the capstone of the Creative Writing major).  All four of the readings were from four completely different genres but all had the same general idea: coming of age.  They were able to read to a full house, and each reading ended with a question and answer section.  This session was quite inspirational for me; I hope to give an oral presentation in three years but instead of a fiction or poetry manuscript, I hope it's sections from creative non-fiction essays.

Overall, a BEAUTIFUL day (the weather was amazing) and it was a great Student Symposium.