A faculty member at The Media School has nominated several students for outstanding research completed in 2022. We invite nominees to share their work at the Undergraduate Research Symposium from 12-3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 5 in Franklin Hall commons. Each student or student group will present a research poster about their work at the symposium. Basic guidelines on how to create a research poster are outlined below.
Undergraduate Research Symposium RSVP and FAQ
Poster requirements
- Posters should be designed at a size of 24 inches by 36 inches. Typically, posters are formatted horizontally (landscape) rather than vertically (portrait), but you can make that decision based on what works best for you.
- You can create your poster with whatever software you prefer. PowerPoint is an easy choice as a PowerPoint page has the correct dimensions for the final poster and your font will scale correctly.
- Save your final poster as a PDF file and send it to Megan Connor by 5:00 pm on Monday, March 20.
- Posters will be printed by The Media School, free of charge to the student.
- Posters will be printed in color.
Poster design tips
- Be creative! A research poster is an art form. How do you feel you can best present your findings?
- A poster should just provide the most important information only. You can elaborate on additional information verbally, or the viewer can contact you for more information.
- Use bullet points!
- Pictures and figures work better than words
- Remember to provide your name and contact information
- Don’t forget an intriguing title at the top to bring in readers and let them know your topic!
- Look at examples; you don’t need to invent the wheel on poster making.
- The font for the body of your text should be size 24 or larger
Today there are generally two different styles of posters. You can choose either style. More information about both styles are in the tabs below. The traditional poster works well for data-driven, social science research. The #BetterPoster format works well for essays and humanities research.
A traditional poster is ideal for social scientific style of research. You will design the poster with four main sections of information.
Introduction/background
Location: This section is in the top left corner.
Tell us what has already been known and why you thought to explore this topic. What is unknown? What is your research question?
Methods
Location: Bottom left corner (below introduction)
How did you go about answering your research question?
Results
Location: Center of the poster
This should be the largest section. What did you find? Great place to put figures or images with captions describing your findings
Discussion
Location: Right column
What do these results tell you about the topic?
Are there further questions?
The BetterPoster format is similar to the traditional poster but focuses on decreasing the amount of words on the poster. You might consider using this style for humanities style of research. The BetterPoster format is organized in two sections: the left side bar and the main section.
Left side bar
Use bullet points to put in all of the essentials:
- Introduction/background
- Tell us what has already been known and why you thought to explore this topic. What is unknown?
- What is/are your research question(s)?
- Methods
- How did you go about answering your research question?
- Conclusion
- What are your main takeaways? What are future questions?
Main section
This is where you put your main findings in big font. What is the big discovery that you found? Feel free to also use this space to put in visuals, such as images or figures, to demonstrate your main findings.
Further poster resources
Both the AEJMC’s Guide to an Effective Conference Presentation and Washington State guide on How to Make a Poster with Powerpoint offer additional information.