Inner-workings of Grad students

So during my time at the U of A I not only get to work in the lab, I also get to sit in on different types of meetings. So one meeting that happens every week is a group meeting; basically, everyone from the lab gets together and talks about what they have done. Another meeting I attend is the CRC meetings. These meetings last just as long as a group meeting, but they consist of many more people (several labs attend these). These meetings are very interesting. Recently, two graduate students have been trying to publish a paper, but first the professors critique the papers. It is really fascinating watching everyone just sit around digest and suggest better ways to word a certain passage to make it more clear.
The most interesting meeting I have seen yet was yesterday. Apparently, there is a huge competition every year that every grad student participates in. The competition gives the winner money to continue their research. So, yesterday, the finalists were presenting their research. I could actually understand almost everything they were talking about! So there were four different finalists who all researched very different topics. The topics that I saw were semi-conductor research, astrochemistry through spectroscopy (this woman found four new compounds in space), research about a certain drug to help pain, cancer detection research. All of these topics were so interesting. It was fun to see all these people get together and even if they weren't from the same field of science ask the finalists intelligent questions. The astrochemistry student won!