Brenton's Research Conference Report

As many of you know, I've been working for the past year with a group from my research methods class for my major and our professor on a project and paper. We submitted our paper to a conference and got picked to go present it! Here's the update on how the conference went:

We presented at the Southwest Symposium at the University of Texas Arlington on November 6, 2009. It was put on by the Southwest Education Council for Journalism and Mass Communications.
Thursday night we all flew into Dallas and had dinner at a restaurant right by our hotel. Friday morning before the conference we went and took the tour at the new Cowboy Stadium. It was so huge and it was a pretty cool tour. We got through a little later t han we thought and had to hurry to get to the conference in time to present.
Our presentation went great! I presented our introduction and a little background, then Shiree presented our methods, and then Stacy presented our results and conclusion. We were the first paper of the first session. We were pretty nervous, but it was a lot of fun.
At the end of the session there were questions and answers and they really grilled us, but I think we did great and it was cool to hear their ideas and their feedback. It was a good thing that Professor Thomsen was there to help us field some of the questions.
Apparently no one knew that we were undergraduates and when they found out, they were even more impressed! It was a lot of fun, and we enjoyed participating in the other discussions and sessions that we attended. We were the only undergrads at the conference. Everyone else were masters or PhD students or professors.
That night there was a dinner and awards banquet. We won the award for Top Paper of the conference! We were so excited! Stacy and I were about to cry! It was such an honor and a great way to end the day. Then we went back to our hotel and celebrated by hanging out in Proferssor Thomsen's hotel room and then toasting with hot chocolate.
I flew home Saturday morning to get back to Adree and Bryson! I missed them. Apparently the others stayed for another few sessions that morning, but missed the shuttle so they weren't able to go anyway.
So now we will be published in the Council's next journal. I'm not sure when it comes out, but I'm so excited for it! We were all amazed to think soon we'll be published authors.
This was such a great experience and I'm so glad I got to be a part of this class, this research group, and this conference. It has taught me a lot. Thanks to everyone who worked on it! It was so great to work with you all! And most especially thank you so much to my amazing wife for supporting me! She came early on to help us practice our tracking and survey, she put up with me being gone sometimes for group meetings and other work on the project. She let me spend money we didn't have to get down there, and was so supportive of me going to the conference even though we were both sad that she couldn't come with me. Thank you so much, honey!