The room was filled with only 8 to 12 people. Everyone sat facing each other, except for one section of the table, which was arranged to face a large TV screen, that showed a small group of people staring back at us. Donuts, and bagels, and lemonade, and sandwiches filled the table at the end of the room, and many people, eager to eat, picked some food before they took their seats.
On Tuesday, September 26th 2017, I attended Session 10A of the International Conference of Undergraduate Research at Baruch College. There were 3 key speakers, all undergraduate students, who spoke about the research in which they had assisted.
Two of the three students were from the University of Warwick (in the UK), and one student was from Baruch itself. The research they talked about ranged from many different subjects. One of them talked about donation trends, another talked about a particular hormone in larvae, and the other body image.
All the presentations took on a very scientific approach to things, going into great detail about their research method, and their conclusions.
The student of Baruch, Lady Cardenas, was the last to present. She talked about larvae and their development stages, and though interesting, it was hard to not cringe at the images.
The student who went before Lady Cardenas, Andrzej Zacharjasz, talked mainly about the UN and its funding. His presentation was centered around economics, and donation trends.
The first presentation, however, was the one that interested me the most. It was the presentation on body image by Harriet James. She talked about body image perceptions, and common reasons for people to exercise, all while supporting such abstract concepts with numbers and statistics.
This conference made me realize how any subject, no matter what it is, can only be supported by objective facts, through numbers and mathematics. That, if Harriet James told me that majority of people see themselves as more overweight than they actually are, I would find it hard to believe without the hard and fast digits that she provided.
