Preparing Yourself
What will happen at the poster session is that strangers (faculty, students, others) will walk up to your poster, give it a glance, and do one of three things:
- Walk away
- Read it
- Talk to you
- If they walk away, you feel rejected. No one can adequately prepare for that. But be aware that people that have different interests, and the topic of your poster is not on everyone’s “A list”.
- If they read it, you will wonder what to do with yourself while this is happening. Again until it happens you can’t know how to prepare.
- But if they talk to you, you can be prepared. That is because they all say approximately the same thing: “Tell me the quick version of what you did.”
- You went to all the trouble of making it artistic, easy to read, self-standing. Yet this lazy stranger wants you to tell it? Shocking! But you can be ready with the speech that you have prepared.
- Go for the visual space that you have designed to stand out, point to it, and give your already prepared quick oral version.
- Because this is an in-house event, you will most likely have non-psychologists in attendance. So, prepare a version in lay terms.