Poster Defense

Friday afternoon most of my class gathered in the atrium of Hasselmo Hall for our poster defense as a culmination of three semester's work on our scholarly projects. One of the adjunct professors told us that back in her day these were individual affairs with an hour long defense. I'm thankful that has changed and it is now a group project with a 30 minute defense. Despite that benefit, there was still some nervous tension in the room as we set up our posters and checked note cards again. I looked around the room and saw the best dressed bunch of OT students I'd seen in four semesters. Two of the men even wore a tie.

My group was scheduled to be the last to defend which actually turned out to be a benefit. We had numerous opportunities to explain our project to potential OT students, 1st year students in the program, and a couple of doctoral students who have helped with our classes. The best one was the woman who introduced herself as Emily's mom. She was paying no attention to Emily as her group presented to their committee which I later found out was the only way Emily would allow her to come. Another classmate said she didn't even tell her mom it was happening because she didn't want her to come. The event also allowed me to meet three of my classmate's husbands.

My group's project consisted of doing a program evaluation of an adult day service program using a quality of life framework developed by our professor. The basic idea is that the activities offered by the program over the course of a week should promote specific aspects of quality of life such as autonomy, individuality, functional competence, enjoyment, social interaction, meaningful participation, dignity, and spirituality. We expected to see each of these indicators promoted by at least a few of the activities and we did. The strongest aspects of the program were the areas of enjoyment, dignity and social interaction. From our observations the weakest were spirituality, functional competence and autonomy. We also realized that some that was due to weaknesses in the form we used for the observations.

After the event, 9 of us went out to eat where more stories came out. One group had received their data from the statistician on Tuesday so had to put everything together after that. Another group realized on Wednesday that their poster was based on a false premise and they had to rework their data and come up with a completely new poster by Thursday morning so it could go to the printer on time. I was thankful for a simple project where the stats that only required addition and division.