Columbia University Computer Science PhD student Zeinab Abbassi presenting her poster at Grace Hopper 2011.
In the previous post, we focused on how to get started with your poster talk. Once you have an interested listener or a group of listeners and you have started your poster talk, what are some things to be thinking about?
Sean Maloney, a PhD student in Computer Science in my UCSB Great Presentations class has excellent advice. He writes:
“If I were googling ‘how to give a poster talk,’ once I have successfully assessed the audience situation I would also want to know how to behave.
There is some good advice applicable to all situations:
• Try to make eye contact with everyone.
• Acknowledge newcomers but don’t interrupt yourself — and don’t let newcomers interrupt you.
• When responding to a specific question, try to position your response to include information about other interesting aspects of your project.
• If appropriate, try to bring the discussion around to the key question “Why did we do this study?” And give a solid answer.
Thanks Sean!