Judging Expectations

You should prepare an oral summary of the important points in the project which you can present in no more than five minutes. Your judges will already have read your abstract, so if you've done a good job there your summary will remind them of questions that occurred to them earlier.

Following your summary, you may find it useful to prepare several short capsule descriptions of important aspects of your project. You know your project better than anyone, so you should have the best ideas of what is important, but you could prepare answers for such questions as "Where did you get the idea for this project?" "What is special or distinctive about your project?" "What is the next thing you would do with your results?" "What questions has your project now generated?" You might also explicitly prepare for the question you hope the judges will ask.

If yours is a project with two or more students working on it as a team, then one person should act as the team spokesman at the beginning and present the oral summary. This summary should include the rationale for the project being a group, rather than an individual, enterprise, and how each member contributed. Each member of the group should be fully knowledgeable about the project and be prepared to then discuss his/her part.

As a way to prepare for the Expo, you might have someone play the role of a judge and you can practice presenting to them.

You should be interviewed by at least three different judges for your category who will spend about twenty minutes discussing your project with you. It is difficult to space these interviews equally, so don't get discouraged if there is a long wait between judges.

Many judges prefer to learn about your project by asking questions. Be prepared for them to interrupt your presentation.

The New Hampshire State Science and Engineering Exposition is a major event. You may find that your interviews with the judges will be competing with newspaper reporters (some with photographers), radio reporters, TV cameras (with their bright lights) and other video recorders for possible promotions of future Expos.