6On June 1st 2011 I attended a National (Japanese) Conference after a year and a half. This time was The 48th Symposium on Heat Transfer that was held in Okayama, South of Japan. This symposium is quite important for Maruyama-lab since this lab's major is heat transfer. I attended this conference with Dr. Okajima and Dr. Mehdi. I was the only student, so I applied to the Best Presentation Award for students at the conference. The students who applied should give a 3-minute presentation and a poster presentation. For me, the 3-minute presentation was the hardest. I thought it was impossible to explain one's research in just 3 minutes. At the first presentation practice at the lab, I basically shortened a 10-minute presentation into a 3- minute one; but, as you might guess, it didn't go that well. Then, I got much advice from my lab members. Since it is impossible to explain everything I should just focus on the motivation and the original points of my research, creating expectation in the audience so they would visit my poster after the session. Like a kind of advertising. Furthermore, Prof. Maruyama advised me to mention that I was a foreign student (Colombian) so the audience would not confuse me with Japanese-born with weird Japanese accent. The result was a quite attractive and comprehensible presentation (picture 1). On the other hand, not much advice is given by the students regarding the poster session. Therefore, I decided to try to make a perfect poster from the beginning. A perfect poster for me, is poster that is easily readable from a distance of approximately 1.5 meters and which uses beautiful drawings, graphs, and colors. However, I also wanted to show some videos about the experimental procedure and the image processing program, so I cut a hole of 148×197mm into the poster and pasted my iPad from behind. These was a great success; most of all very easy to understand. Thanks to iPad I was able to effectively show the creation of the diffusion field as well as the image processing, while making the connection with the experimental results and conclusions of the research (picture 2, 3). Of course, pasting the iPad was not such an easy task. Even though I used some cardboard to fix the iPad behind the poster so there was no big level difference, the poster got a bit heavy and dropped. After fighting to fix my poster, I could finally continue the scientific discussion and finalize my poster presentation (picture 4). I had a couple of lively discussions with some professors about the concentration dependency of macromolecules. Two hours later the announcement of the best presentation award was given. There result was me receiving the award with 5 other students. Great success thanks to Maruyama-lab members. After finishing the conference, I could go with some sightseeing and relax a little bit with Dr. Okajima and Dr. Mehdi. We went to Okayama Castle and a beautiful Japanese garden called Kourakuen. The Japanese garden was impressive, definitely one of the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen. I didn't know about Okayama before the conference, and to tell you the truth I didn't expect for Okayama to have such a beautiful place. That is it, a great memory at this conference in Okayama. In the future when I visit Okayama I will remember this conference and with no doubt a wonderful feeling will fill me.