DAY 4

Today was a relatively straight-forward day, in terms of what we planned to do and what we accomplished.

During the morning, we revisited some of the issues and concerns that were brought up during the day before (in the peer talk-back session) and after discussing different options that everyone had for their projects, the participants really dove back into their research and planning for another few hours, essentially trying to fill in the last remaining caps on the 'project proposal' forms that O'Herne (the TYA 14 president) had given them yesterday during her workshop and then formalize the entire document (typing it up, proofreading it, adding illustrations, etcetera)

When all of this was done and the documents were all submitted, we all met again to discuss what everyone, in the committee thought of the conference on a whole (a more detailed summary can be found here) in terms of the preparatory phase, the schedule, the workshops, the projects, and the general TYA management. As this weeks format was a very large change from all previous formats, it was really important that we got feed back as to what worked and was was not as successful.

Overall, everyone was really positive about the entire process and loved the conference; people especially loved the opportunities to meet so many new people from so many different cultures and backgrounds. One thing that was also brought up multiple times was that the participants especially enjoyed working with myself and my fellow coordinators because "unlike some of the other committees, we [myself and Mattia] really knew how to balance working hard and taking much needed breaks." There was one complaint that was shared across the committee though: people thought the days were too long because on some days, it seemed there was a lot of free time. I think, however, this was more due to the fact that everyone worked much harder and faster than we than we expected as we had never run the conference in this format before.

Finally, to end the day, we had our conference wide photo taken at the World Forum (where we met the first day for registration) which was a great because you got to see all sixty-odd people together at once and you really appreciated the magnitude of work that must have been done in the past few days. All-in-all, it was a nice moment to end the day with