We’ve finally made it to the end. We did it! This last week of the SCIART program, we had the pleasure of presenting our research at UMBC’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fair (SURF). This research conference is held every year for all UMBC’s undergraduate summer researchers. It was surprising seeing the number of people attending, with this year’s hosting well over a hundred researchers. Surprising still were the number of high schoolers in attendance, as well as the depth of their researchers. I’m sure they will be able to go far in their future careers with a start as good as this.

This conference was my second time presenting research, with the first time being at UMBC’s URCAD. This conference, relative to the previous, felt much more-relaxed, likely due to its shorter run-time. I was still excited, however, as we were able to present the results we worked so hard for in this internship to friends, families, and all those interested. We were able to successfully identify a sample of ivory as African in descent. While we were only able to obtain genus, it is still reassuring to know that our methodology is sound and, with future research, our goal of optimizing identification techniques could be realized. I hope in the future I can have research presentations as nice as this was.