Rough Start, Smooth Ending

I have to admit that today was a day that I was definitely not looking forward to. I needed to go out to the Science Symposium and stand next to my poster for others to see and ask questions. I've always been a nervous wreck and when I feel the slightest pressure I tend to go BLANK!! Anyways, so I was standing beside my poster when I was asked if the poster next to me was mine- two things immediately popped into my head DENY, DENY, DENY, or just say yes and look like a deer caught in headlights. So I said 'yes' and he proceeded to convince me to take a photo with my poster (WHEW!). When I thought that was the extend of our meeting he asked me the dreaded words, "Can you please explain your poster to me?" WHAT! Can he not read for himself? I think that was the point where it went splat! All my hard work just erased, I had nada, zippo, ni-fu ni-fa, my brain was literally MUSH! He just stared at me waiting for me to say something so I looked at the poster and read the title, DOH! I knew I had to say something else so I just pointed out that I had conducted several tests and it was ultimately inconclusive but we were working on trying to answer some of the questions that arose from the experiment. Then I admitted to being extremely nervous being that he was the first person that asked me a question but there was so much more to my experiment than what I said to him. He started laughing and said he was very happy with my short answer because he had previously asked another student the same question but he talked for almost twenty minutes. So we shared a laugh and we went our separate ways.
Later during the day, I showed Dr. Therrien, the Curator of Dinosaur Palaeoecology at Royal Tyrrell Museum, my poster and things went completely different. I was able to explain my entire poster, what steps were being taken, what my thoughts we on as to why my results weren't easily interpreted and what I thought should be done about - he asked questions I answered them without hesitation. Everything just "flowed" it was an awesome feeling to finally be able to represent my hard work and show just how it important it really was. It was great and he told me how impressed he was of both my poster and the work itself. So, yeah, my day started off all wrong but by the end of the day I totally made up for it! Yay me!
Next hurdle: Meeting the National Science Foundation (NSF) Director on Saturday...I guess there's more to come then, huh? HaHaHa Stay Tuned!