Recently though, I experienced a new first. My first academic poster presentation. It may not be life defining, but it's definitely been an interesting process to work through, so I thought I'd give my perspective on it as a Masters student doing one for the first time.
We were informed that our poster should be on future anthropogenic environmental change, linked to an element of environmental dynamics, such as Phosphorus, land slides, soil erosion and so forth... we were required to create the poster, which we would then present to the rest of the group.
Naturally, I decided to pick something invasive related. Invasive plants it turned out to be.
At first, I figured I should just conduct research like I would if I were to write an essay. So I found a bunch of decent looking recent papers, made my notes and had a fairly good idea what I wanted to write.
Then I decided to actually write an essay. I felt that this would help me create a structure, which I could then transfer over to my poster directly, without losing too much wordage.
I had information, but I didn't really know what to do with it in terms of presentation. So,t he next thing I did was look at some of the posters in the department. I also had a read of the British Ecological Society guidelines for creating posters, to get a different perspective. They suggested putting my Twitter handle on it, but my tweets are probably 90% football related (I should really get a separate account for academic-y stuff).
In any case, here's a version of one of the first things I put together....
At this point I thought great, I have created something full of information but it probably needs to be tidied up. I was also lacking a reference list and certain personal information which needed to be added.
But I was still not sure if this is what a poster should be like. So I asked for the opinion of some people who know more about posters than me. The general feedback I received with that my poster was too verbose (at about 600 words), to lead people into the topic but not to be overly detailed.
I was also told about a prize winning poster, with a grand total of 30 words. THIRTY. I did not dare to cut my word count by that much though!
I did, however, hack away with the aim of removing superfluous words, whilst still trying to maintain the same level of information.
I became aware though, that by doing this it would be making certain aspects of the poster more difficult to interpret for people that perhaps may not be so familiar with the topic. Additionally, I did have to remove some information.
But rather than let that fall to the cutting room floor and end up in waste disposal, I thought I should provide additional information on this very blog, which is what I did here.
After taking away a lot of words, and rearranging the design a bit, the final poster I created looked like this.
A crucial difference between this poster and my previous offering is that I no longer have to squint to read it! I also decided to use bullet points as an effective away to more clearly highlight individual points. I also simplified the aims and introductory information and added a reference list, in the smallest font I dared to use, so as not to take up too much space.
I then began thinking about what I was going to say in my presentation. I figured we might be required to speak for 5-10 minutes, so this was what I aimed for initially.
However, we were then informed that we would only have two minutes each to talk.
My initial reaction to that was something like this:
How was I meant to put across all the things I wanted to say in that short amount of time?! I haven't actually given the talk yet but my last attempt was two minutes thirty seconds, so I'll need to try and become more concise in the coming days.
It seems a shame to me that we don't have longer to talk, but if that's the way things are going in academia, then it's good that we're doing it in that style.
So that's about it for the poster I have created, but I'll leave you with some general feelings.
One big point I'd like to make is I wish we had done a poster in my undergraduate degree. From what I hear, the format of creating a poster and giving a talk for a couple of minutes is becoming more and more popular.
When we did our undergraduate dissertations, I was fortunate enough to present my work to the year group below me in the form of a powerpoint presentation, but many people never got a chance to show off their hard work and efforts to a wider audience. Also, i'm finding there's a big difference between preparing to give a powerpoint, and presenting a poster.
We were in groups of about four or five per supervisor. It might have made a nice tutorial assignment maybe to create a poster (not an A0 beast, even just A3 would be good for the practice) and present it to the people in the rest of the small group. That's just my two cents anyway...
Thanks for reading
Rob
