Presentations

Yesterday, I went to the Digital Media in a Social World conference on OSU’s campus.  It was a good conference.  I was a little nervous for my presentation.  Only four people came and one was a friend, so that ended up being good.  It turned into an interesting discussion and I’m glad I did it.  The conference wasn’t my favorite one ever (too many vendor presentations), but it was decent.

Flash forward to today, I’m actually in Oxford right now at the grad student conference.  There wasn’t anything I really wanted to see during this session, so I decided that I would take a break.  The past few days I’ve been on academic overload and I think I can stand to miss one little session.

*Warning, feeling nostalgic, but may change my mind tomorrow.*

I drove into Oxford this morning and it felt so strange.  I haven’t been here for about three years and every time I come to visit, I feel like I am communing with the 19-year-old-Laurie that was here as a happy-go-lucky undergrad.  It’s strange that a place can make you feel an old part of yourself.  When I got to campus, I parked on a side street, walked past the houses, almost forgetting the tradition of naming houses and posting a sign (the one I can remember from this morning was Morning Wood.  Nice.).  I walked into McGuffey, that houses the school of education, for the first time since I graduated and my mind was sort of blown.  When I was here, McGuffey was the crustiest building on campus and since then, they have completely remodeled and it is actually very nice.  Not as nice as the business school, but still, I was impressed!

The conference is full of interesting people that care about social justice and like Bergamo, I will be back.  This is my kind of conference.  And, it helps immensely that it’s a grad student conference.  I felt much more at ease.  My presentation was the first session and it went pretty well.  I talked too fast, but I was trying to cram a 45 minute presentation into 20 minutes.  Ah well.  I got some good feedback and made at least one contact.

After lunch, I was spent and decided to walk around campus for awhile and take the aforementioned break.  I headed uptown and walked past the Fiji house, St. Mary’s, Dubois’, Follett’s, the old First Run, the old Attractions, the Princess theatre.  Every spot had memories associated with it and I started to feel kind of emotional.  Things seemed simpler then.  And more fun.  Since it’s Saturday afternoon, the town is pretty quiet.  I saw a few students walking their parents around uptown.  A few alum back with strollers and babies.  I decided to take slant walk down to King Library to relax and write my blog.  The town feels so peaceful next to the big city madness of Columbus, with its city buses, busy streets, and the necessity for the constant surveillance of your surroundings.  Here, it was so easy to cross the street, that it was kind of surprising.  It made me wish that I was here again for graduate school.  I feel like I could think better in the peace of it all, in the tiny town in the middle of cornfields.  Maybe someday I’ll be back again as a professor.  Right now, that sounds grand.