Day 3 - The Poster session and 'we shouldn't expect too much'

So, the first after-party day was here and considering jet lag, hangover and early waking up for breakfast, we were OKish. The girl part of our team somehow didn't know where and when we meet, so sadly, we had to start without them. We got to a bus, that took us to the breakfast place and after another American breakfast - 8:30 - (bagels, muffins, fruit, eggs (?) and of course terrible coffee by European standards), we again made a plan about visiting other presentations.

bullshit, he doesnt really want that :))

breakfast table

Harvard was up and some other prominent names, so it was quite interesting, however we still felt we did an amazing job compared to most. We also hung up our poster and every free minute we had, we tried to stand next to it and explain our project to any curious souls passing by. Most were excited, some of them invited us to their poster session and all in all we had a great time meeting new people and having to share our ideas and achievements with others. It was what Jamboree was made for, networking. Fun times.

Slowly getting through all the presentations, we started to get hungry and a bit tired, so we were happy when lunch time came. It wasn't much of a lunch, more like a pumped up sandwich, but hey, it was "free" (if we don't count the $400 entry fee for each member and 4 digit number for the team). After getting some energy back with food and drinks, we decided it would be best to continue visiting other presentations and see how others were doing and try to find tricky questions. A few teams presented some great projects and we started to wonder if it was healthy to be so sure we'll be in the finals. We didn't want to get disappointed, but we all quietly hoped we'll get there.

@ harvad presentation

We managed to check out most of the presentations we wanted and after the final one (what up Minnesota!), we wanted to get ready for the official poster presentation time which started at 19:30.

We brought out our leaflets and fired up our laptops for animations we made in Maya and our human practice short video in plain english. Let the "Hi can I take you through our project?" begin! It's funny how at the start of the summer, I (as a computer scientist) had no idea, how exactly are we going to integrate to the team of life sciences students and at the Jamboree, I knew enough about our project to confidently take anyone through the project. Only when someone asked me how we did this and that experiment into details, I had to poke one of the other students to help me out. It was a nice feeling, seeing I learned so much over the summer. Right before the end of the poster session, we even tried our human practice board game "DNA Explorer". We quickly realized that it's not a drinking game, so we finished early.

our poster + dna explorer

messages for our team from other iGEMrs

preparation for the poster session after lunch

preparing to diplay the leaflets/dna explorers

gangsta?

Tina I. @ the poster session

the beginnings of bonding with team mexico

Nejc explainig our project to a student of Johns Hopkins University

After a few 10s of people passed and a few judges left with happy faces, our spirits were high again. We even managed to explain some complicated answers we had on our presentations. 'The Sven judge' asked a lot and it was obvious he's interested in how and why we did stuff, but at the end, he was satisfied and we were all happy! Fun times.

Although our spirits were very high, our mentors and instructors warned us not to feel to confident as the disappointment when expectations are not met can be devastating. So, in our heads we said that we're already winners, just because of the high interest in our project from other students and all the great feedback we got. The feeling actually was both awesome and amazing. With our emotions high and all the general happiness around us, we started to get ready for the party at Jillian's right next to the Red Sox stadium.

Me and Jernej decided it would be smart to go through the presentation one more time, in case we manage to get to finals. We added some stuff to the presentation went through it once, while drinking some Heineken. We realized that we know stuff and that some of the phrases were heard so many times, they were beginning to be funny ('What we see here…', 'It's both awesome and amazing', etc.). Even other team members memorized them and were making fun of us. We even turned them to pick up lines! They're both awesome and amazing (see what I did there?).

So, Jillian's! We drove there in old yellow school buses made of win.

failed attempt of a school bus photo #1

failed attempt of a school bus photo #2

They were creaky and smelled terrible, but still great. Once we arrived there, we got stamped and headed inside. There was food, there was drinks and we even got some coupons for soft drinks. Surprisingly, both beer and liquors were quite cheap. While convincing ourselves that we shouldn't drink because of the possibility of another presentation next day, we drank "a bit". Even our instructors and mentors were having fun!

No comments needed for the following pics.

We bonded with some more students while the night kept on going towards morning. Finally, the party came to an end and we again had a bus organized back to our hotels. The thing you have to love about MIT and Jamboree was its organization. Any time we had an organized event there was a bus to that building, there was always food and drinks around and help on every turn. For our presentation we managed to sort out lighting, sound and projector. It indeed was cool and very nice.

After arriving to Hyatt, we went straight to bed, for finals were up next day and we had quiet expectations that our name will come up on the finalist list.