WRT333

Poster Sessions

You may have already experienced the joy of Poster Sessions. When my son was in the seventh grade, he did an experiment with ground beetles and oil, making a bit of a mess in a terrarium and killing a few carabids in the process. He then made up a chart showing how increasing amounts of oil added to a terrarium resulted in fewer beetles living, wrote out a couple of pages about the experiments and his results, and stuck the whole thing on two large sheets of foam board, decorated with pictures of the insects and with lots of colored paper backgrounds. He entered this into the middle school science fair. He also discovered that the quickest way to encourage science fair judges to move on was to offer to explain to them how to make a terrarium. I'm not sure whether there is a connection, but I recall that he came home with a red ribbon and a smile.

Poster sessions are great for conversations about science (but don't talk about how to build a terrarium). As scientific conferences have grown, they reached limits on the numbers of presentations that could be made, even when limited to a series of 10-minute presentations, and the overlap of several simultaneous sessions approached a limit on the utility of speeches. The poster session provides a high density alternative, filling foyers or non-seating ballrooms with presenters who are available for longer blocks of time, and for more intimate exchanges. View a poster session as a great way to talk about the latest developments, including work that is only part of an emerging picture, but still exciting to others working in parallel efforts. The task, then, is to make it as friendly as possible for a reader, grazing a room full of interesting posters, to engage with you and your work.

Keep in mind, too, that as a poster presenter, you are engaged in scientific socialization. This is a chance to meet people with similar, possibly nerdy, interests! That is, it is a primary opportunity for professional networking and the establishment of enduring contacts. You should recognize this as a direct and proper purpose for your presentation. Accordingly, ask yourself what it is that you want to happen in the mind of your poster visitor. I would suggest that you place a premium on impression, which is a matter of form as well as substance. Sorry, but you'll have to dress up. That includes yourself and your presentation. Here there is an element of allowing the media to talk as well as allowing the message to talk. If Einstein were an American undergraduate, dressed in frumpy sweater and corduroy's and with rumpled hair, presenting a set of notes on yellow paper outlining his theory of gravity or of relativity, would he be recognized for his genius? (Let's not ask whether people capable of recognizing that genius would be hanging out in the poster room of a scientific society conference; their department chairs and colleagues might!)

Remember that your message is going to be taken in on the fly, as the visitor wanders through the hall. They will be standing back at a distance, and many of them will have out-of-date glasses. Make your key messages few and large. Illustrate with sparse graphs and inspiring, informative pictures. Make it pleasing to the eye even for those who take it in without reading a word. Stupid, complex and distracting backgrounds, pointless artwork and borders, etc., that are capable of distracting or impairing visibility just have to go. Keep it simple, colorful if you must (but with great taste and reserve), restful and intriguing for your visitor. You are presenting yourself in the best possible light. Take the time and make the effort to indeed make it your best (meaning, too, that you need to allow plenty of time for preparation, weeks before the session).

Poster sessions have many of the attributes of speeches. The grazer has little time or patience, and plenty of opportunities to move on to the next presentation. You want to identify your topic with a clear and readable title. You need to present the gist of your question and the barest outline of your methods. Be selective in the results that you present, enticing (but perhaps not giving away the as-yet-unpublished store) the wandering audience. Err on the side of brevity and conciseness, asking yourself what 1 or 2 things is it that I want this conversation to instill in the mind of anyone who stops to consider what I have been doing?

You do not need the details, either in methods or in results. Those come in the formal publication, and everyone should understand that. What you put on the board isn't a test of your brilliance. it is a test of your ability to think about an audience and to present to that audience the essentials that they would be most interested in, or delighted to discover that they'd never thought about it before (and thank you for the insight). Should you want to provide greater details, have paper ready to hand out.

For occasions like this, you may also want to consider having a personal business card printed. These should identify you, your academic affiliation, and basic (academic) contact information. The cost is relatively low and there are many services able to create these for you. They make it easy for people who are impressed with you and your work to recall you. And if just one of them is your future employer, was it not worth the few dollars and the hour it took to do this?