{"id":10900,"date":"2025-06-26T15:28:02","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T03:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/?p=10900"},"modified":"2025-06-26T15:33:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T03:33:33","slug":"why-should-you-give-a-poster-presentation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/?p=10900","title":{"rendered":"Why Should You Give a Poster Presentation?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Story time. Back when I was a PhD student, my university ran an annual postgraduate research event – much like the AUT Postgraduate Research Symposium<\/a>. I went along as a first-year humanities student, excited to see what everyone else was working on. There were fascinating talks on a huge range of topics, performances and demonstrations, and of course free food. It was a stimulating and educational day out, and made me even more enthusiastic to enter the world of postgraduate research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But walking into the poster session, I was truly surprised. I had assumed that, because posters are a visual medium requiring design skills, they might appeal to researchers from creative disciplines. I expected to see work from my colleagues in the arts and humanities prominently displayed (perhaps even overrepresented) on the posterboards. But instead, the posters were almost all from the sciences – and in fact largely medical sciences. Why, I wondered, were posters so ubiquitous in those fields, and so absent in others?<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Posters
The poster session at the 2024 AUT Postgraduate Research Symposium<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

As it turns out, the popularity of posters at scientific conferences has been studied. A research team interviewed 89 delegates at a healthcare conference, and found that posters were valued in that context specifically for their capacity to give a rapid ‘snapshot’ of multiple research findings, while enabling networking and discussion (Soon, Tudor Car, Ng, Tan, & Smith, 2022). With a poster, you don’t need to rely on audience members sitting down for a 20-minute talk; you can still engage in conversation during the poster session, but you can also take advantage of foot traffic past your poster throughout the whole conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traditionally (and of course this is a generalisation) those in the arts & humanities have tended to favour oral presentations over posters. But I’m a firm believer that all <\/em>researchers can benefit from communicating research in a variety of ways, and that posters can be an impactful mode of research dissemination across all disciplines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the second year of my humanities PhD, I contributed a poster to the postgraduate research showcase. I was the only researcher from my department to do so. And honestly, I found it so useful<\/strong><\/em>! Not just for disseminating my research (though yes, for that too); but moreso for looking at my own project through a new lens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had been hyper-focused on my written thesis, and so my default mode of expression was to use words. A lot of words. Abundant and bounteous quantities of verbiage. But showcasing my research on a poster forced me to switch gears: using text economically, adding pictorial elements, and grouping concepts for easy visual interpretation. The work that had previously existed in my brain in a kind of amorphous ‘word soup’ took on a newly clarified shape. The process of producing a poster enabled me to reconceptualise my research, and helped me to distill it into a form that I could communicate much more easily. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words: making my research visually clear for others<\/em> helped to make it clear for myself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gained even more perspective when I attended the poster session and spoke with attendees about my research. As a poster presenter, you can have unique interactions with audience members that aren’t always possible in other types of presentations. You can watch people respond to your work in real-time, and have informal conversations that allow you to discover what people find exciting (or confusing, or revolutionary) about your research. I noticed when eyes glazed over; I noticed when they lit up. Those reactions helped me to identify the elements of my research that had the most popular appeal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So presenting a poster really worked for me. But why should you do it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are in a discipline that commonly uses posters as a means of communicating research findings, then practising your poster design skills will have a direct payoff. Anyone aspiring to a career in scientific or medical research will probably need to know how to communicate complex information in a clear and visually appealing format, and there’s no better time to build those skills than during a PG research project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even if posters aren’t frequently used in your discipline, there are real benefits to giving it a try. Not only can it open up new ways to think about your research, it can also give your communication muscles a different kind of workout than they get during your everyday thesis-writing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Want to have a go? We welcome poster presentations for the AUT Postgraduate Research Symposium<\/a> <\/strong>on Thursday 11 September. All you need to do at this stage is submit an abstract<\/a> by Friday 4 July<\/strong>, and then we’ll be in touch about preparing and submitting your poster. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find loads of tips on producing a great poster from the Better Posters blog<\/a>, and AUT’s Centre for Person-Centred Research helpfully publishes examples of their excellent research posters here.<\/a> You can do the actual design in the software programme of your choice – PowerPoint and Canva are great options for design novices; whereas Adobe Illustrator or InDesign can suit more experienced designers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However you prefer to create your poster, I highly recommend going through the process at least once. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Reference<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon, C. S. L., Tudor Car, L., Ng, C. J., Tan, N. C., & Smith, H. (2022). What is the utility of posters? Qualitative study of participants at a regional primary healthcare conference in Asia. Medical science educator<\/em>, 32<\/em>(6), 1405\u20131412. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s40670-022-01657-z<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Story time. Back when I was a PhD student, my university ran an annual postgraduate research exposition – much like the AUT Postgraduate Research Symposium. I went along as a first-year humanities student…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6725,"featured_media":10901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[114,66,15,83,130,82],"class_list":["post-10900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-category-4","category-category-3","tag-communication","tag-dissemination","tag-postgraduate","tag-pg-symposium","tag-posters","tag-presentation-skills"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/Postgrad-Research-Symposium213-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1706&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p83npQ-2PO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6725"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10900"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10912,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10900\/revisions\/10912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesislink.aut.ac.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}