I am grateful to have received the NSW Statistical Society of Australia Travel grant to attend the Young Statisticians Conference 2019, held at Manuka Oval, Canberra, on 1-2 October. The travel grant helped cover all of my registration, dinner, accommodation and transportation costs to Canberra.

After driving down from Sydney on Tuesday morning, it was straight into a keynote session by Teresa Dickinson from the ABS, which started the day off well with many other excellent presentations from contributed talks throughout the day, as well as another keynote by Calvin Hung from Quantum Black. To conclude the first day, I attended the conference dinner, which was held at the Kingston Hotel. A lot of fun was had, with good pub food, competitions to draw the best normal curve, and helping build Wikipedia pages for famous female statisticians.

On the second day, after Alison Hill’s great keynote presentation, it was my time to present my work on generalised discriminant analysis, which was my last project in my PhD. I very much enjoyed presenting my work and had fruitful discussions about my work during lunch. For those who could not make it, my slides can be found here: http://bit.ly/SR-YoungStats.

To finish off the conference, I was very fortunate to receive first place for the ‘Louise Ryan Award for Best Presentation’, which was a very welcome surprise!

There were so many amazing talks and I was so humbled to be awarded with such an honour.

I would like to say thank you again to the NSW SSA branch for this opportunity, as it was a very enjoyable and educational conference, with many friendships and ideas I will take with me throughout my career. I highly recommend any young statistician to attend!

Sarah Romanes