Messina: ISEF message

Joel E. Tohline

Professor
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Louisiana State University

Excerpt from Meagan Messina's e-mail message dated 5/16/00:

"I wanted to tell you about how I did at ISEF. I didn't get any awards. But that's okay, I was glad and appreciative that I got asked to go. It was SOOOO much fun. I met people from Denmark, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, NOrway, Italy, Ireland, and so much more. I got to practice spanish and all that though. I got a lot of judges though. Some people don't even get judged there. I got about 18 judges. THey were really nice. They kept complementing me, and telling me that my work was very very good for a freshman. After awards, I realized that hardly any freshman got any awards. There was only a 100 freshman out of 1050 people at the fair. A nobel prize winner from Princeton University was walking around and came up to me while I was pretty much finished setting up my project and was like, yeah I was looking for your project, I read about it in the titles, will you explain it to me. I could have got no awards (which is what happened) but it made my day that this man stopped to talk to me about my project, he was so nice. He wasn't judging it was before judging."