On the day of the competition, Yeji, Joel and I met online at 12.55 pm. We were nervous but also confident knowing that we had practised much in the days leading to the actual presentation.
As the first team to present, we readied ourselves to do our best. At precisely 2 pm, it was finally time to present. To stop my muttering, I spoke loudly. Before I knew it, I finished my presentation. Joel and I recited the lines from our script while Yeji controlled the pace of the presentation slides. It was all timed perfectly. Our hard work had paid off!
During the session, there was a brief moment where Joel’s audio was muffled. Fortunately, we already had a backchannel via discord. So, I spoke louder during that portion to cover his voice. When his audio setting was resolved, I stopped talking and let Joel continue his portion of the script. It went through quite smoothly, so no one knew that we had technical difficulties!
The 5 minutes presentation felt like a lifetime. Eventually, we completed it and responded to the Q&A. The judges asked some great questions, e.g “What bacteria used in the study? Would the conclusion derived from the study is sufficient to generalize the effectiveness of Clorox regardless of bacterial species?”
To which Joel and I responded that we obtained the bacteria from our school’s canteen cleaner’s cloth. So, our experiment only addressed common bacteria found on canteens/hawker centre table surfaces. Nonetheless, we thanked the judges for their questions and took note of it as a possible follow up research.
I felt proud that we could handle all the questions thrown at us, I was confident because our team did a lot of preparation for the Q&A.
The rest of the day, our team relaxed and watched other teams do their presentations. At the end of the day, after the final team’s Q&A, I was surprised to receive feedback from one of the judges, an NUS professor Dr Coleman. She highlighted our group and praised us. She even added that our research was as good as some of her first-year university students projects! When she said she wanted to keep in touch with us, I almost burst with pride.
Regardless, the results of the competition (only one team will be selected to join Hyper Interdisciplinary Conference in Singapore in 27 Feb 2021) I already felt like a winner. This conference has given me added confidence in leading a project team. Its been an amazing experience and I am thankful to SST for the opportunities.
I learnt much from the competition, and I will cherish this experience for many years to come.
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Howie Chia
4 November 2020
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