It went well! I made some connections for grad programs, which was nice. Hopefully I left a good impression, even though I was excessively sleep-deprived and therefore very prone to talking straight off the top of my head or not at all. I am doing my best to understand my entire project, but there are so many moving parts and so much background that I have trouble keeping track of it all, so it is easy for people to ask me questions that I struggle with. There were a couple of people whose questions I do not think I answered well, or even to the best of my ability, which is a damn shame. I did get a *much* better sense of the level at which people are expected to know their topic, which had been absent at the other conferences I attended as few people were super tuned-in to the subject area there (who were willing to run me through the curry comb).

There was one very strange experience that I had, which was quite upsetting at the time. Fortunately I am able to think of it as just kind of funny right now, but oh boy. Before the poster session started I saw that there was a boy there with a similar project to mine (in that it involved computing center manifolds). I didn’t really think anything of it, and my quasi-grandpa (idk how it applies to undergrads) in math geneology visited me and said that our posters were pretty different. I didn’t think anything of it until the guy came over with his friend and started doing an extremely close read of my poster. They didn’t make it past the section labeled “Assumptions and Conditions” before they started questioning me. I had an idea of what the answer was but I wasn’t 100 percent because I had never really thought about it before, to be fair. They were not satisfied and became slightly belligerent. The one with the poster told me he had been sending people over to scope out my poster and report back to him, and that he was afraid of getting scooped. It was almost time for the session to end, and another guy came over (who turned out to be A Big Shot). I talked to him for a bit, then returned to the two of them and tried to make conversation. “What do you study?” I asked. You know, because with a project like this it is obviously some kind of applied math, but with focuses in numerics? topology? geometry? I am an undergrad, I don’t know how this stuff works! His response: “math.” 

Alright, immediately you can fuck off with that shit. I wanted so badly to tell him to go fuck himself, but was also distracted slightly (to be honest) with the sudden urge to cry. I eventually was able to make them go away (there was another person who literally ran over to me to ask questions 10 minutes after the session should have ended; I don’t remember this encounter at all). 

In general, I have found that the younger people (i.e., grad students, esp. dudes) tend to be rude toward me if they feel as though I have not lived up to their Standard of Knowledge. Professors will sometimes be maddeningly condescending, but at least they seem to understand better where I am at in the learning process and accepting of that, whereas younger people are, like, offended by it. I don’t know exactly what was going on in this situation; our projects are different enough that it’s not like we can’t both get published. It’s also not like all math people are insufferable assholes. In fact, some of the nicest people I know! and etc. But I guess This Guy felt a particular way.