At the panel review, I realized how creative some minds can be. I assume that the most creative people are the most passionate about what they’re learning. It’s too easy to get caught up in doing something for a grade, rather than treating it as something to challenge yourself with. If grades or time didn’t matter, I would imagine that I’d be more creative too. It was also easier to tell what students spent ample amount of time on their papers and who turned them in last minute. Giving yourself enough time to think, write and edit your papers results in a higher quality product. One thing that I’ll take away from this experience is to be more creative. When comparing my proposal idea to other student’s, I could have come up with a better idea. There must be balance between creativity and relevance to others. An idea might sound really obscure to a panel review because your own personal interests are too niche, but on the other hand, you want to think of an idea that no one else has. When thinking about experimental design, more detail and the simpler the better. You have to assume you are presenting an idea to a group of people who have no idea what you are talking about, which I fail to do sometimes.
Another thing I enjoyed about the panel reviews is discussing other papers with the group that I was assigned. Anonymity helped us provide better quality constructive criticism. Being in a group relieved a bit of bias because we were able to hear other people’s opinions and gauge how reasonable our feedback was. It was difficult to rank people’s proposals because we all had different ideas of what was a “good” paper. I was rating proposals based on creativity and relevance, while one of my group members was rating proposals based on how reasonable an author’s procedure was. Mixing all these views on what was “good” helped us pick the most well-rounded proposal. I’m interested to see who the winners are for the proposals since other panels most likely judged differently than my panel.
