{"id":603,"date":"2012-12-06T10:29:43","date_gmt":"2012-12-06T15:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/?p=603"},"modified":"2012-12-10T14:44:47","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T19:44:47","slug":"preparing-posters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/2012\/12\/06\/preparing-posters\/","title":{"rendered":"Preparing for the Final Poster Presentations"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past Tuesday was our final colloquium before the public presentation of research posters (to be held on December 11th, 2012 from 5:30-7pm in the Social Science Center at Williams). Being one of the four students conducting a year-long project, I was not busy getting ready for the poster presentations like the other six students.<\/p>\n

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Discussant Ayiti Maharaj-Best assists Annie Arnzen with her poster (Photo by Michael Oleskewicz)<\/p><\/div>\n

Instead, I was designated as a \u201cdiscussant\u201d to help another student review and finalize her poster. As we have done for every colloquium, we were assigned into small groups of roughly three faculty members and two students, and met over lunch. In the days leading up to this meeting we received draft posters from all of the one-semester research projects. As a discussant for Anne Arnzen\u2019s poster on the Judy Dworin Performance Project, I spent a lot of time reviewing her presentation slides to come up with feedback that I felt would be useful for her.<\/p>\n

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CLI Fellow Gracie Phillips (left) reviews her draft research poster with Professors Diane Zannoni and Judy Dworin. (Photo by Michael Oleskewicz)<\/p><\/div>\n

At this stage in the semester, we have all had opportunities to learn about each others\u2019 projects. We have rotated through different small-group interactions and watched each other present in the preliminary presentations. Having witnessed each\u00a0 project evolve and progress throughout the semester, I was a little taken aback by how far all of my peer researchers have come. Sitting with Annie, I could think of the earlier meetings in the semester when her research was just beginning and it was unknown what findings she would discover. Now at the other end of the semester, she has executed all of the research methods she talked about during the initial colloquium meetings and informal lunches. I have spoken with Annie about her project several times this semester, so by this point I felt like I could appreciate what her focus was, who her audience was, and what she hoped to convey. At the same time, we have not worked so closely that I felt my perception of her project would be skewed by personal involvement. I think this is a major benefit of this colloquium. I am able to approach my peers’ projects with a familiar eye and, being in the midst of the research process myself, can really identify with other students’ goals.<\/p>\n

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(Counter-clockwise) Tim Naratil, Sarah Gardiner (TA), and Professor David Reuman discuss draft poster by CLI Fellows Ben Rudy and Evan Sternberg. (Photo by Michael Oleskewicz)<\/p><\/div>\n

When I arrived at Tuesday\u2019s meeting, each student researcher\u2019s slides had been printed out and mounted onto a poster board by Professor Clark, to simulate what their poster would look like using their current slides. I think that this form of presentation was extremely helpful and allowed everyone to begin to visualize what the final posters would look like. Furthermore, it helped us all to see some of the design potential that had been difficult to appreciate while viewing the information as slides of a Powerpoint. Annie\u2019s presentation, for example, focuses on the arts as an intervention for women and children affected by the imprisonment. Seeing the information mounted on the poster board really exposed the potential for use of images to supplement the text. This setup allowed us to talk about both the content and the visual layout of the final poster. As always, you never show up to a colloquium empty-handed. I brought a list of comments and suggestions that I prepared in advance for Annie, and she brought a pen and paper to take notes on the feedback she received from the group. The three professors in my group, along with Annie and I, were able to walk through the poster, section by section, and discuss what we felt were the major points of each. We then spent a lot of time discussing ideas about how those main points could be most effectively presented.\u00a0 This would allow Annie to engage the reader\u2019s attention with clarity and concision, all the while keeping her community partner in mind as the audience. The usefulness of the presentation workshop led by Sue Denning earlier in the semester re-surfaced here. We were all impressed to see how students used the information from this workshop to present their information in creative, reader-friendly ways. Annie was able to take her qualitative results and generate tables that certainly helped me, as a reader, to zoom in on her significant findings. As impressed as we were with all of the posters, by the end of our meeting all of the presenting researchers had plenty of new ideas on how to optimize the effectiveness of their posters. They left that meeting, prepared to make those adjustments and re-convene on Thursday night for a final session before the public presentations next week. Although my poster won’t be presented this semester, being involved in this part of the process with my colleagues has really inspired me to start thinking about how I too will share my findings when my turn comes around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past Tuesday was our final colloquium before the public presentation of research posters (to be held on December 11th, 2012 from 5:30-7pm in the Social Science Center at Williams). Being one of the four students conducting a year-long project, I was not busy getting ready for the poster presentations like the other six students. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,33,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":632,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions\/632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/cli-research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}