Networking And Poster Preparation at an International Conference: Tips From Emre Yavuz

Emre is a PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, fellow at Founders of the Future and member of the RIN Younger Members’ Group. This article was first published in the July/August edition of Navigation News.

At the beginning of May, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present a poster at the FENS (Federation of European Neuroscience Societies) regional meeting in The Algarve, Portugal. The poster reported on my PhD work investigating the association between GPS reliance and human spatial navigation performance. In particular, the focus was on a part of my PhD research, supervised by Professor Hugo Spiers, where I looked at the association between reliance on GPS use as measured by self-report questionnaires and human spatial navigation performance measured using Sea Hero Quest. Sea Hero Quest has been mentioned in Navigation News before but for those unfamiliar, it is a series of navigation tests developed by our team in the form of a mobile video game app. 

Both presenting and networking at an international conference can be a daunting experience, so I’d like to pass on the following insights to anybody who feels apprehensive about doing the same.

9 Tips for Preparing a Poster

1. Visuals

Focus on the visualisations first. What will look most enticing, the clearest and the easiest to interpret for the reader? People will be scanning 100s of posters, and so ensuring that the key figures are as bold and as clear as possible, with clearly labelled axes, will very much help the reader take away the gist of the results.

2 Be clear 

For the introduction/background, try and keep this to around three clear bullet points, to give the reader a brief enough overview of why you investigated what you did, and where it fits into the broader scientific literature.

3. Make sure your reader can understand your logical flow

For the methods, presenting these succinctly and in a visually appealing way is key. If the reader can understand the logical flow of the steps you took to get from your hypothesis to your results, such as by using arrows and flow diagrams etc., it will help them to understand the pattern of thought you had when designing the experiment and analysing the data. 

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Emre Yavuz

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