Our guest speaker last Wednesday was astounding. If you ever have prepared to do a presentation yourself, you can appreciate the amount of time and energy Briana would have invested to deliver with perfection: fluently, clearly, precisely and with good diction. She made it look all so easy, she had her audience nailed! And quite uncommon for a teenager: not a single ‘Uhmmm’, ‘like’, ‘basically’, ‘ya know’ ...!Our club sponsored her to attend the National Youth Science Forum (NYSF). Normally held in Canberra, this year COVID-19 forced it to go on-line. Still, so Briana enthused, it was very worthwhile indeed! “I found NYSF’s most valuable resource to be their range of STEM experts” she said. Among these were Professor Barry Marshall, Dr Carola Vinuesa and Professor Brian P Schmidt. Both Professors Marshall and Schmidt are Nobel Prize Laureates, Dr. Vinuesa is the co-director of personalised medicine at ANU.
Briana made it clear that attending the NYSF is not just about pure science but about live values, such as the value of perseverance. A point in case is Prof Barry Marshall, whose discovery of a cure for duodenal ulcers earned him the Nobel Prize. “There were over 20 years between his original discovery and his receiving of a Nobel Prize”, she said, then cited the Professor: “If you have the facts, you don’t have to worry if nobody believes you.”
Question Time, as expected, was boisterous. What are your future plans? she was asked. “I changed my initial intentions of a career in computer science or biomedicals to go for medicine” she said. Other than Science, Briana is involved in the Duke of Edenborough program, studies Literature, High Level Maths, Classical Singing (she participates in the choir), helps in Student Prep and Debating.
Briana’s PowerPoint presentation and her corresponding speech is available from the Download Section on the right. You should run the two concurrently, the text shows when to change slides. Photo, from left: President Charles Thomasson, Briana's father Michael Dorrough and Briana Dorrough.