Judging day started at about 8 am and ended around dinnertime. When we arrived at our booths, there was a blue card waiting there for us that showed 12 time slots and names of judges in approximately 6-8 of them. Basically throughout the judging periods, there would be 2 minute warning bell that sounded at the conclusion of each judging session to warn finalists and judges that the next session would be commencing shortly.

When you did not have a judge assigned to a time slot, it was either break time, or a professional awards judge would swing by to ask you a couple of questions. These judges, like the ISEF judges, have already previewed your project the previous night, and might've taken copies of your abstract and made notes, in preparation for their questions for you.

The first 2 judging periods (approximately from 8am-3pm) were busy for all finalists, but the 3rd was designated for clarification for the judges on final placements of category and professional awards. By the end of the day, the 11 Michigan finalists were exhausted from the long day and concerned about the difficult questions that were left unanswered. 4 of the girls and I crowded into one hotel room to order pizza and watch Disney movies all night- we called it our ISEF pity party.

At one point our fair director came by our room, waved a flash drive in our faces, told us he had all of the results, and walked away and told us we'd have to wait until the awards ceremony to see who won. We called the rest of the Michigan finalists together and we spent the night vandalizing our fair director's hotel door with our poster boards and duct tape as playful protest. The fair directors also decided to band together too, and actually managed to seal all 10 of us inside our hotel rooms using science fair poster boards and duct tape as well.