Juiceboxes and Communication

Our meeting with the BE Communications Fellow was super last minute. We didn’t sign up until OH the day before, at which point there weren’t even appointments available in the afternoon of the next day (this was worrisome as our Grant Proposal Presentation was the day after). Thankfully, Maxine was sitting right next to us and offered to email one of the fellows to see if he could take a meeting with us.

The next day, me and Pearl met up ready for the meeting. I was kind of anxious because we hadn’t really practiced our presentation yet and there were even a couple of slides missing and I honestly just didn’t know what would happen at this meeting. But Diana invited us into her office to grab some snacks before our BE Fellow showed up, and juice boxes have a very calming effect.

Basically me.

Finally, our meeting with Bill started and it was a little bit of a whirlwind. We tried presenting for the first time together, and it went surprisingly smoothly. He had really great feedback for us afterwards, both regarding slide content and for our overall grant proposal. I lost my anxiety as soon as we actually started talking to him (equipped well with my juice box). We managed to talk for almost 45 minutes about our project, and I felt a lot better about it afterwards. Presenting the project to someone a little removed from the 20.109 bubble was really beneficial, and I wish we had gone sooner. I think adding a BE Communications requirement earlier in the semester would be super helpful for future students.