I’ve been off this project long enough that anyone can consider it over from my last post. And well, it was. I wrote and completed my thesis on it, presented it in front of all other contestants and judges, and received an award for being above average.
So why am I posting this? Well, I don’t enjoy studies at all, and I really have nothing else to do but that. Thinking through all the other things I could possibly do excluding games since I uninstalled all of them to study for CSAT, this came to my head.
Here’s the link to the Korean version of the thesis, which I’ll translate eventually. Eventually. Although I wrote that our ‘team’, which includes 송태희 and 박세영, did the entire research together, I later requested the teacher running the contest to remove them from my team. Initially, I figured that since they helped me once(…out of countless times I visited the lab over 2 months), and since I told them I will have them listed as my teammates, I couldn’t see a good reason to cut them out of the thesis. However, after telling the Top 1 of our school about this, I was pretty convinced that they don’t really deserve an award if I do win one. I planned the research, wrote the thesis, and prepared the presentation. All they did for me was differentiating the gender of the test subjects, with half of them figured wrong. Of course, that is still help and work, but compared to all the time I spent and work I’ve done, and the amount of responsibility and care they gave towards the research, I personally think that wasn’t enough. [[MORE]]
I won’t go in detail about my presentation, but I thought I was terrible. I was too nervous and anxious about it for absolutely no reason, to the point where the laser pointer/slideshow remote dropped and broke on the ground because I was shaking too much. I never shook so much while presenting, and I did a handful amount of them. I’m just going to believe that it was because I was speaking Korean instead of English. But surprisingly, I won a award, like a said at the beginning. About half of the contestants get an award, with only one getting like, the grand award or something. Sure, the chances weren’t that low, but I was sure I wasn’t going to win the other contestants, who I have to say, were surprisingly better than I expected.
Like an average person, I hate clusters of dead maggots and fruit flies. I would have just thrown the tubes just as they are, but considering the possibilities of at least a single fruit fly still living in there, I had to open each and every tube. The tube I took a picture of was the most disgusting tube I ever threw away, because the chain of the clusters were glued to the caps. Not only did they smell, I had to witness a strand of insect corpses dangling on a tube in front of me. I almost puked.
I did that for all 25 tubes, and that was it. The project is over. It was an interesting experience, as generic as that sounds. I didn’t expect the experiment to take this long, or be this hard. If I knew earlier, I definitely would’ve planned it better. The contest as a whole made me think of my lack of creativity, as well. So many other contestants were able to think of interesting yet cheap research topics, while I whined about the my need for impossibly large funds and legal rights for the research I wanted to do.