Honors Conference

I am not sure about the rest of you guys but I had a wonderful time at the honors conference. Most of the presentations were good and a few were great. My favorite of the day was a Chase de Saint-Felix's "The First Sex and the "F" Word: A Male Response to Feminism." He was one of the few presenters that was confident enough in his knowledge of the subject to present without having a written presentation to refer too, and he pulled it off well. The presentation itself was focused and he developed his points thoroughly. My next favorite was probably Brian Bowman's "Idiolect: Arbitrariness of the Terms 'Language' and 'Dialect' in Describing Linguistic Variation." Brian was a natural in front of a group. He had the mannerisms of someone that had been teaching for years and I would not be surprised if that is what he ended up doing. Third on my list is a tie between Kevin Tolliver's "Campaign Spending and Voter Behavior" and Jessica Hawley's "Seurat and the Theory of Optical Mixture." I enjoyed Kevin's presentation on campaign spending because it was informative, right in my circle of interest, and he totally rocked the pink tie. Jessica's presentation on Seurat was eye opening. Until now I was only into surrealist art, but I will be adding Neo-Impressionism to my list of artistic interests and I can not wait to make it back to Chicago where many of Seurat's works on on display. So I would like for those of you that attended to post what your favorites were and why. Maybe you saw something that others did not. Well too bad I will not be around to go to next year's with you guys but here is hoping Prof. Branch can get us included in the Oxford trip.