Poster Sessions Can Lead To Networking Opportunities

Through the process of trial and error, scientific societies and veteran poster presenters have come up with the following rules of thumb for effective poster presentations. 1. Prepare a banner in very large type containing a descriptive title, the authors, and their affiliations. This banner should be situated high up on the poster so it can be seen above people's heads from a distance of 15 to 20 feet. 2. Bracket the poster with an introduction at the beginning and a list of conclusions at the end. Remember that many people will read only these two parts of your poster. 3. Make the flow of information in a poster explicit with the use of inch-high numerals. The flow of information should be organized in columns running down the poster, not in rows running across it. 4. The poster should be self-explanatory, so that its main points will be communicated even if you are not there. But don't load it down with large amounts of methodological detail or lists of references. Curious observers can ask you about these things directly. 5. Each illustration should have a prominent headline containing its take-home message in just a few words. The text below the illustrations should be in smaller type and should contain far more information than the typical figure legend. Only the most interested readers will spend time with this text. 6. Prepare a presentation of no more than five minutes (preferably two to four minutes) to walk interested parties quickly through your poster. 7. Make the poster well in advance and practice it with your colleagues, much as you would practice an oral presentation. 8. Taking into account Murphy's Law, bring extra push pins (not thumbtacks) with you to the meeting. And consider making up two complete copies of the poster. Mail one copy ahead or send it with a friend. 9. At the poster session, let people peruse your poster for 30 seconds or a minute before approaching them to ask if you may lead them through it. But don't be shy about introducing yourself, since the opportunity to meet people is one of the major advantages of poster sessions. 10. If you have a preprint of a article already prepared, consider having a supply ready at the poster session to hand out to people who are especially interested. If not, take down names and addresses and offer to send the preprint when it is ready. Poster sessions are becoming an increasingly popular way of enlarging the number of presentations without expanding the duration of scientific meetings. Posters require more preparatory work than is involved in a brief talk. But, say those familiar with the format, posters provide an efficient and effective way for scientists to inform others of their research and a chance to have personal contact with the leaders in their field. In addition, they say, posters can open doors to job, postdoc, and graduate school opportunities. Dara Norman, for example, was able to parlay a poster session into an informal interview for admission to grad school. After finishing her undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Norman had been working at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center for three years, but she desperately wanted to go to grad school in the department of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle. She knew it wouldn't be easy to get in. According to Bruce Margon, the chairman of that department, "Typically we receive 200 applications for four or five slots, so no matter how strong one's academic credentials, there's a certain element of a lottery." Norman was scheduled to give a poster presentation at the 1992 meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and she figured that, because astronomy professors from Washington were likely to be at the meeting, this was her best shot at distinguishing herself from the crowd. She had submitted her graduate application in the fall of 1991, the meeting was in early January, and the admissions committee wouldn't be making up its mind until sometime in February. Because of her situation, she approached the poster presentation as if it were a job interview. "In the poster sessions, only people who are really interested come up to your poster," Norman says. "And if they're the people who are interested in what you're doing, they're the people who are likely to give you a job or get you into graduate school." Margon was one of the interested parties. Margon and Norman, as it happened, had observed the same active galaxy with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, but with different instruments--Margon's group used the Faint Object Spectrograph, and Norman's team at Goddard used the High-Resolution Spectrograph. So the noted astronomer and the prospective student had a lot to talk about. As Margon puts it, "I was certainly very impressed with her when I met her there, because she turns out to be an exceptionally articulate and thoughtful and interesting person, which is something that really can't come across in the paper application. I was able to tell my admissions committee that this is someone who looks good on paper and was clearly even better in person." It is this opportunity for personal interaction that is one of the major benefits of poster sessions, scientists say. "Had it been an oral paper, there are a huge number of parallel sessions, so the probability of my ever having been there would be really small," says Margon, "whereas the poster papers are up for an entire day, so the probability of collision is much larger." This story, whose happy ending finds Dara Norman pleasantly ensconced in UW's graduate program, illustrates several of the many advantages of poster sessions. Because oral presentations at scientific meetings have the weight of hundreds of years of tradition behind them, many scientists once regarded poster sessions to be a second-class stepchild, a far less prestigious way of presenting research results. But poster sessions are becoming an increasingly accepted and even preferred forum at scientific meetings. According to AAS officials, for example, the alternative to a poster presentation at meetings of the society is a mere five- minute talk. Moreover, at an oral presentation, a speaker must rush to present even the bare bones of his or her results, in rooms so darkened for the slides that the speakers often cannot even be seen clearly by the audience and have little chance to engage interested people in discussion or to make a favorable impression. The possibility that a paper will be presented as a poster increases year by year at most scientific meetings, as the number of abstracts submitted grows without concomitant increases in the length of the meetings or the number of meeting rooms. According to Kevin Furlong, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University and program chairman for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) national meeting, about 35 percent of the 4,700 papers at the December 1992 AGU meeting were presented as posters, and that number goes up by about 5 percent each year. Of 1,945 papers presented by the American Physiological Society, a constituent of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, at the April 1992 FASEB meeting, 1,204 were given as posters, 107 as poster discussions (a hybrid form of poster session), and only 634 as oral presentations. But those who like posters must love the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting. Out of a total of 9,361 papers at the society's October 1992 meeting, 8,066 were posters--fully 86 percent. Experienced poster presenters warn that creating an effective poster requires much more than just slapping a copy of an abstract and a few illustrations onto a piece of corkboard. Compared with short slide presentations, posters tend to require a greater degree of preparation, not only in terms of the physical display, but also in terms of one's understanding of the material. As Furlong notes, "At a poster presentation the questions become in-depth fairly quickly. People have more time to think about the questions, and they can follow up on them. A person should be very careful in a poster presentation not to have anything on there they don't fully understand." Ernie Nordeen, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a veteran of many poster sessions, echoes this sentiment, but notes that a certain degree of ignorance can be more forgivable at a poster session than in an oral presentation. "Probably more so than in a talk, you may have people looking at your data from a completely different perspective than you're used to. I think you have to be prepared for almost anything and also prepared to be entirely up front about not knowing and wanting to learn about the questioner's perspective. In a poster session it's perfectly reasonable to say, `I don't know the answer to that question. What do you think?' There's less pressure on a poster presenter to have a pat answer." Steve Maran, an astronomer at Goddard, recommends practicing a poster session much as one would practice an oral presentation. "No matter how smart you think you are, no matter how good a job you think you've done, you need to present your poster to colleagues and let them give you their suggestions. Make it up well in advance of the meeting, post it up on the wall outside your office, and take a look at it pretending to stroll by at a distance of several feet. See if it looks like something you'd like to have a look at. Unlike oral presentations, where you're trapped in a room, with poster presentations you walk right by, looking for a better poster." Daniel Gardner, a professor of physiology and biophysics at Cornell University Medical College, and his wife, Esther Gardner, a professor of physiology and biophysics at the New York University School of Medicine, have given a great deal of thought about the most effective way to present information on a poster. The Gardners wrote the Society for Neuroscience's "Suggestions `for Preparing Effective Posters," a feature in the preliminary program for the society's annual meeting each year since 1989. Says Daniel Gardner, "Good poster design tries to maximize the ability of the presenter to get the information to the largest number of people, and also maximizes the ability of the meeting attender to get as much as possible from a poster and to see as many posters as possible. If it takes 30 minutes to work your way through a poster, then an advantage of the poster is lost. So the goal is to design a poster that has perhaps 30 minutes' worth of information if every word is read carefully and every figure is analyzed thoughtfully, but it should also be designed so that someone whose interests are more peripheral can get a take-home message in 10 minutes." Virtually all scientific societies require that the top of a poster contain a banner printed with type at least an inch high (or 72 points, the unit of measure used in determining height of type) stating the title of the study and the names and affiliations of the authors. This can be generated by most full- featured word-processing programs using laser printers. The individual sheets of laser paper can be taped together and used as is, or they can be taken to a continuous photocopy machine, available in many print shops, which can produce strips of paper six inches wide and four feet long. The Gardners strongly recommend that the poster be bracketed by an introduction at the beginning and some clear conclusions at the end. Daniel Gardner notes that this introduction must be quite distinct from the abstract, which is designed to serve as a distillation of the entire paper. "The introduction has to explain what you're doing, why you did it, and what the state of the art was before you began your work." As for the conclusions, "Many people look at the conclusions first to see if they want to devote time to the paper. They should be in large enough type to be read by people six or seven feet away." The Gardners recommend that the sequence of illustrations in a poster be made explicit and obvious, with the use of numerals at least an inch (72 points) in height. And the information should be arranged in columns running down a poster, rather than in rows running across it. Notes Daniel Gardner, "If there's a cluster of people around, it's much easier to get an unobstructed view of a vertical column than of the top or the middle or the bottom of a poster." He also advocates the use of different-colored backgrounds to distinguish separate experiments or regions of the poster. Each figure and table, say the Gardners, should have a headline in large type describing its essential point. And the text below each figure, in much smaller type, should not be thought of as a mere figure legend. Rather, it should be the same sort of commentary that would appear in the "Results and Discussion" sections of a published paper. Some poster makers are beginning to use desktop publishing packages to design their entire poster as a single unit. The resulting computer file can be put on a disk and taken to a specialty print shop with a large-format color printer. In this way the entire poster can be prepared as a single large sheet of paper, which is easy to roll up and transport, and very easy to post. Many scientists prefer to peruse posters while the authors are not there, and some meetings accommodate this desire by having the posters up for a full day, with the authors present for half a day or less. For this reason, posters should be designed to be self-explanatory. Despite this, says Nordeen, one should not load down the poster with a great deal of methodological detail. Anyone interested in that much information can question the presenter directly. But, says Nordeen, "I have the impression that most people looking at a poster want an invitation to be led through it. They want to have some dialogue. I think it's the presenter's responsibility to ask someone who's reading the poster, `Would you like me to walk you through this?' More often than not they'll say yes. That accomplishes two things. First of all, it takes the burden off the reader, and, second, it forces an introduction that might not otherwise be made." Furlong, however, notes that while "you're a salesman at a poster session,... I think it's inappropriate to strong-arm people into it." Although Dara Norman dressed for her poster presentation as if it were a job interview, at many scientific meetings dress is informal. As Furlong says, "You'd probably look out of place in a three-piece suit at an AGU meeting, but by the same token you want to stand out." If a group of people are standing around a poster, Furlong notes, a passerby would probably figure that the one dressed slightly more formally than the others is the poster's presenter. Finally, those who have narrowly averted disaster advise poster presenters to take Murphy's Law into account. For example, many presenters have learned that it's a good idea to bring one's own supply of push pins, even when the meeting organizers say that these will be provided; push pins tend to become scarce toward the end of a meeting. And the true student of Murphy's Law will want to make up two copies of everything in the poster, sending one set ahead in the mail or with a friend, and carrying the other on the airplane. That way, if one copy gets lost or damaged, the presenter isn't faced with the embarrassment of standing in front of a blank corkboard. Robert Finn is a freelance science writer based in Pasadena, Calif.

Poster Sessions Can Lead To Networking Opportunities

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