Designing and Presenting a Conference Poster

On November 12th to 13th, we had our first Softskill Workshop entitled Designing and presenting a Conference Poster”with Pete Moore (Think Write, UK). Here are some impressions of the course program:

Before you can be accepted to present a poster at a conference you normally have to submit an abstract. Writing this helps focus your mind on the central aspects of your work, and also helps organisers know whether you have something of value to contribute to the meeting. Our 12 IRTG students participating in this workshop therefore spent a couple of minutes thinking through the task of writing an abstract that aims to get the organisers excited and gets you invited. The next task was to consider the aspects of poster design: content, structure and printing. The students were stimulated to examine existing posters and rapidly sketching design options for future posters. As a practical example, the first group activity for the students was to design posters on “how to cook eggs”.

On the second course day, the students had some time to sketch a poster that describes their thesis project, and then practiced describing the poster to colleagues. By video recording of the individual poster presentations, the participants could learn by watching their own performance. In addition, the trainer gave personal feedback to each student.