te: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 14:18:50 -0500 (CDT) From: "Lynda Ellis (LabMed)" To: Bioinf-general@mail.ahc.umn.edu Cc: Bioinf-gradfac@mail.ahc.umn.edu, Alison Baerwald Subject: [Bioinf-general] Symposium Evaluations Thanks to Alison Baerwald for summarizing the Symposium Evaluations. 35 of the 100+ symposium audience members returned an evalutation form. The responses were scored 5 = Excellent, 4 = Very Good, 3 = Good, 2 = Fair, 1 = Poor. -------- -- ----- Item N Score -------- -- ----- Overall 34 4.2 Packets 34 3.9 Room 35 4.3 AV 32 4.1 Food 34 4.0 Schedule 34 4.0 Posters 31 3.7 Speakers 31 4.1 17 respondants had additional comments. Congratulations: "Great location. Liked posters." "Nice to be able to eat outside." "The Sequence of the speakers is very well chosen. That makes the whole day very interesting." "Very nice. We will return." "This was a good work. I encourage to have this kind of symposium often (as possible). Thank you for the refreshment." "An excellent Variety of speakers!" Critiques: "Schedule more networking time. Run until 5pm?" "Break up afternoon. Start Later." "Ideally there would be more space and the posters would be close to the talks." "Posters: The set-up was extremely congested. I knocked into people every other minute. The poster boards could possibly be along the wall rather than columns. Room was designed for a limited capacity and seemed like a wall barrier from the speaker. Maybe the talks could be structured in a terms of material covered (eg. biology, genetics, biochemistry, stats and computations.) That would have helped." "It would be very helpful if there is a way to have a copy of the communication of the speakers in the Registration Packet." "Posters little overcrowded." "Having the longest lecture section at the end of the day was difficult. I would put the longer sessions earlier and give more breaks at the end." "Wireless Mics for questions." "Include pictures of UMN Bioinformatics Faculty/Staff in info packet." "Too Short. 2 days program is better." "Poster area hot and crowded. Could have used a larger area. I was also surprised that many of the speakers didn't know how much time was alloted to them. I found it very difficult to stay awake. I believe a more cooler temperature would have helped me." "Last row of chairs should be removed, connecting both sides, making it easy for late-comers to get a seat." "As a computer science student, I would have preferred to have more time devoted to the computational aspects of bioinformatics. However, there seems to be far more attendees from biomedical disciplines." "Posters were too close together to view easily." "More room for posters would have been better. Herman-miller chairs were great! I didn't really see much bridge building today." "Wireless Mics? Poster area a bit crowded."