Saturday, May 22, 2004

My first ever conference – 3rd Scientific Meeting of Biomedical Engineering Society (Sgp)

It was my first ever participation in a conference – in national level. It was organized by BES (Sgp) and hosted by Ngee Ann Polytechnic. My paper was accepted for the conference and so.. I had to present the paper. The paper was about my Final Year Project (FYP).

The presentation was only for 10 minutes and followed by 5 minutes Q&A. The time keeper will ring a bell in the 7th and 10th minutes.

Right after the presenter before me finished his presentation, I was heading to the podium to set up my laptop. Then, with a bit of nervousness, after the moderator allowing me to start, I started to present. I believed that in the first few seconds the audiences could always tell that I was quite nervous. However, luckily, I still could control my tone and pitch. After sometimes, I feel quite confident and I was able to get rid of my nervousness, and so on until the end of my presentation. I managed to finish my presentation before the 10th minute bell was rung. I was afraid that I exceeded the allocated time before, because during my rehearsal I always did. Q&A session was opened. 4 Judges and some audiences were asking questions. The good thing during the Q&A was I and my supervisors (my NTU supervisor, and SP supervisor) had shown good team work. I answered, then they supported me, and vice versa.

It’s my first time participating in a conference - a national event. It was really an unforgettable experience. I never thought that my FYP could turned out to be something recognized by the society in my field, biomedical engineering. My hard work was paid off. I did not really confident with my FYP work in the beginning though, until I almost quitted the project and turned to other project. A project of hard work, that had made me sacrifice my holiday, had given me a pride. Thanks God!