Reflections on the 2018 4th Year Conference
Every year the School of Psychology at Deakin University holds a conference for our 4th year students. Students develop a conference poster based on their research project and present it to their fellow students, friends, family, and academic staff. It marks the end of their 4th year candidature and is a great way to end the year.
Our on-campus students (Andy Head, Anna Jackson, George Loram, Imogen Russell-Head, Maddy Matthes, Raissa Donadon Berne, and Glenn Chamberlain) all presented at the conference in person. While our off-campus students (Ian Benjamin, Gerard Cavalida, Kate Adamson, and Susanne Lohmann) developed electronic posters and were there in spirit.
All of the students did an amazing job of representing themselves and the Lab. Particular congratulations to Andy Head and George Loram who won a Poster Prize for their poster “Improving the Measurement of Contested Science Using Item Response Theory” and to Maddy Matthews and Anna Jackson won a poster prize for their poster “Identifying Profiles of Health Belief”.
Lab Member Maddie North presented at the conference as a 4th year in 2017. She was there to cheer on our students at the conference this year and wrote a short reflection on the conference and the Misinformation Lab 4th year students for us for 2018.
“The Fourth Year Conference a year on from having to present your project at it is a much less terrifying affair. The conference is a great chance to see what everyone else has done during the year, show it to family, to thank supervisors for all they’ve done, and to be proud of yourself for doing an entire project in seven months. The lab fourth years have been such a wonderful group to begin my research journey with, they’ve all done such an amazing job this year; the conference, and their posters were testament to that. I didn’t get to see any of them talk about their projects as I was judging other posters, but given that both Anna and Maddy, and, Andy and George won a prize I would say they did more than okay! All of you should be very proud of yourselves. It’s been a pleasure to be affiliated with them and the lab this year and it will be sad to see them go as they have officially finished fourth year. See, we told you it would end eventually, the light at the tunnel is finally here! But as they are released into the wild of postgrad, research or getting a job I think the sentiment is all the same; come back and visit us when you’re all famous in your chosen career paths. Because we all know this bunch of people has some incredible things ahead of them.”