What are your thoughts on this?

One of my supervisors has suggested that I do a poster for a intra-departmental (psychology) conference that they have every christmas (which initially I thought would be a good idea) but on reflection, there are three problems with this:

1. Deadline is (I think) in two weeks' time
2. I have never ever made a conference poster ever before
3. I have nothing to present.

Quite literally, the only research I have is my in-progress-lit-review, and the stuff I'm submitting to ethics and external committees...so I guess I could make a poster with the background to my study and diagrams of my stimuli etc (which, according to some people, is a thing that people sometimes do) but I do feel like most people would present an already carried out study with data and findings? There's no way I'll even have preliminary/pilot data before pancake day, let alone christmas...

Hi Magdatrix,

I think it is fairly common for posters to be just of the initial stages to demonstrate your plans and thinking. You don't have much time to create one, but there are plenty of templates and examples on various University websites. I found these useful when making mine up.

It will be taken into account that you are a first year when the posters are judged, as they won't directly compare you to a third year who is almost finished. A good poster can be made of your topic, initial reading, any conceptual framework as a visual and then your future plans. It's actually harder to do a poster once you have data as you then have to be more selective of what you include/exclude!

Hope this helps, someone more techie might be able to help with the actual detail, although I think I created mine as a powerpoint slide as it made it easier to create text boxes and visuals.

I recently had to present a poster at a conference without having any real results - I was fortunate enough to have piloted my materials with a few people so could include some feedback from my 'pilot study' but apart from that, it was just a presentation of ideas. I would ask your supervisor if they can recommend any decent posters around the department for you to have a look at. My supervisor sent me a copy of one of his and said just to be guided by the format of that. I also created it as a Powerpoint slide, put everything in large font (minimum font 36, as people don't tend to read it otherwise) and if you can put in diagrams or tables, so much the better. Go for something visually appealing rather than lots of text!