Free Lunch for Grad Students :D

I mean, er, Research Fest! Rock on.

Most universities devote a day or two to Grad Student Orientation, complete with lectures and windows on grad life. At ANU, it lasts about a week and its organizers re-named it Research Fest.

Its lectures cover current issues such as the Rise of China as an economic and political power, climate change, and Pure v.s. Applied Science. The event is also filled with networking activities and introductions to PARSA (grad student soc). Perhaps the largest draw for research students, though, is the free lunch that doesn’t, surprisingly, include sandwiches but exotic food instead, like rice noodle with tofu…

I’ve attended the first two days of Research Fest so far…well, okay, I’ve gone to 1st two complimentary lunches, which I R. S. V. P.‘ed for ahead of time online. initially I felt a bit like an ass, so I went for one lecture and almost stayed for 2nd one after lunch hour. But strangely enough, it seemed to me that the room was most saturated by the grad student body during lunch hour, then the crowds simply dissipated by the first afternoon lecture. I also bumped into 3-4 ppl I knew, who said they were here for the food heh. Then we all promptly left after lunch, right after the wine draw, and joked that we’ll see each other again for lunch tomorrow…

Another highlight of my day at research fest was the myriad of poster presentations from all the disciplines at ANU, from physics, history, psych, ecology etc. Some of the randomest research projects (or so I thought, but what do I know) were on display.

Nevertheless, my favourite was a poster on the Fiddler Crab and Male Territorial Behaviour if they lost their claw. The conclusion was that clawless male fiddler crabs are treated like females (all clawless) and tend to alter their territorial behaviour (i.e. less aggressive about their space). Another canuck laughed at it when he saw it, saying it’d be great if that applied to all species… That kind of made me wonder what part of the human anatomy could be analogous to the fiddler crab’s claw and whether it would be a good thing… The poster also had a beautiful regression (or was it correlation?) slope on her graph supporting her conclusion (I was a bit jealous of her statistical figure/result).