Thanks again everyone The project supervisor accepts that it's generally advised that you 'leave the nest', but it's not necessarily 'damaging' to one's potential in an academic career. I'm going to chase this local project and see how things go

Thanks for your replies so far; it's really useful to know other peoples' opinion on this. It seems that there's perhaps a little leaning towards studying somewhere new. I've now approached the prospective supervisor to express my interest for the project, and ask his advice on the matter too. What is important to me is that it's not an absolute no-no, or instant academic career suicide to proceed again at the same institution.

Journals tend to be more prestigious than conferences? I guess that depends on the journal and it's reputation in academia. It also has to be said that conferences are an excuse to go somewhere really nice, e.g. Hawaii

Symposium: A 'super-conference' of smaller conferences, e.g.: http://www.ieee-ssci.org/

Conference: e.g. http://www.computelligence.org/sis/2007/
- one of the conferences as part of the symposium, above.

Journal: e.g. one of Nature's publications, http://www.nature.com/ng/index.html

On the flip side are journals, that are established publications, ranging from the popular (e.g. New Scientist) to the academic (e.g. Nature) that have their own panel of reviewers (I think so at least ). There's no 'deadline' to journal submissions, whereas conference submissions have a time frame to get the papers checked in time for printing for the event. Please feel free to disagree if I'm wrong anywhere here! This is my understanding of it, and I still have a lot to learn.

Conferences are occasional or annual 'meets' organised by a committee, with a group of appointed paper reviewers who review submissions and select the most suitable, original, best etc. papers for publication in a book: 'conference proceedings'. Conferences are self-funded - i.e. people attend because they are interested in the conference subject matter. People who attend pay a registration fee, which provides for e.g. a printed book of proceedings for all registrants. It's like an 'expo' for [insert cool academic subject here]. If you get a paper published, you need to present either a poster or a talk about your document at the event

I got caught in a local vacuum after finishing my BSc: after completing a really interesting (not to mention funded) MSc course at the same Uni, I've now found the ideal DPhil, and am very tempted to apply as I'd like to pursue a career in lecturing/research.

The problem? This will result in a clear run of qualifications from the *same institution* - I'd find it difficult to move out for a similar course elsewhere however as I'm loathe to leave behind my fiancee, who cannot relocate due to her work; does it reflect badly to have a set of quals from the same institution?

Important basics of design for print - Use Adobe Illustrator (download 30 day free trial if you don't own it), and set the document size to the poster size, ensuring that all imported images are *at least 300dpi*. Generally for printing onto paper media you should set any colour mode to CMYK, otherwise expect to be looking at a very different colour to that which you intended for. Your chosen print house will love you for sending them a .ai file of the right dimensions and colour specification, all ready to go. You might have the option of 'encapsulation', which is basically a glossy, water resistant finish, otherwise, plain old matte will suffice.

For my own paper, I've two key take home messages (my algorithm methodologies), but there's a bit of background knowledge necessary for these to be understood. So, I divide the poster into 4 sections, the topmost (likely where the viewer looks first for the start of the information stream) lays out the basics, following on with the second, which expands into a new but related concept directly relevant to my two points; the final two then lay out my messages nice and clear.

I'm a freelance multimedia specialist/designer when I'm not an academic, so I knew the importance of *design for visual clarity* (how often do you switch off when you see e.g. a set of lecture notes that is just pure text?) Too much text on a poster is visually offensive, and won't make the content any easier to understand. Use big text that can be read across the room for titles, and try to compartmentalise key points within individual, visually distinctive blocks (easier to digest chunk-wise) - you've likely got stacks of space, so use it to the full. Saying this though, don't be too scared of whitespace - it's generally necessary to set the 'leading' of any blocks of text (space between lines) a little higher than default. Trust your eye - yours are as good as any other viewer's.

Think also about a 'commentary' as the viewer scans your poster - from top to bottom it should communicate coherently.

3 parts, cos I talk too much :P

I recently had an A0 poster of my MSc dissertation printed for presentation next week. My motivation was to create an *attractive* and primarily *visual* basis to my paper; I didn't worry about results and tables, as readers will have these to hand in conference proceedings. The poster then offers an opportunity to expand on the paper content a bit, giving you the chance to emphasise key 'take home' points, in mine, the development of two modified algorithms, for example.