Environment poster

We have provided several different poster templates and, if you like, you may choose one of them to use for your scientific poster. These templates are intended to help you design and construct your poster. The templates were designed by Dr. Lower or staff at the Wexner Medical Center at OSU. You are NOT obligated to use any of these templates, they are merely a guide to help you. Feel free to design and construct your own poster. You are free to use any color, any font, any design that you like. The OSU Health Sciences Library provides excellent instructions on creating a poster with Microsoft PowerPoint: http://hsl.osu.edu/medvis/tutorial/creating-posters-microsoft-powerpoint The dimensions of these posters are set at: 48-inches width by 36- inches height. You can change the poster size by selecting File > Page Setup. You should keep the height set to 36-inches and the width at 48- inches.

It is extremely important that you only use high-resolution images, photos, figures, logos and graphs for your posters. You should NEVER use any figures that are blurry and of poor quality. To see if the image that you want to use is “high-resolution” simply insert the image into the poster template (typically your images will be TIFF, JPEG or PDF files), resize it to the size you’d like to use on your poster. Next, from the PowerPoint menu select “View” and “Zoom…” and then Zoom to at least 100% (I’d recommend zoom to 125-150%) and then look at the image on your screen. If the image is blurry then do NOT use it! The poster that grabs the most attention is ALWAYS the poster that has the most colorful figures, photographs, tables, etc. If you want to capture an audience you need to draw them in with a compelling title, well- designed poster and exciting figures. Once you have a captive audience, then the poster’s tables, graphs, data, text, etc. can be used to tell the full story. Make sure you cite EVERY figure, data, photo, graph, illustration, map and table with the proper reference. Unless you collected the data, figure, photo, graph, illustration, map or table yourself, you MUST cite the reference from which you obtained the information.

Remember that you are a very important, perhaps the most important, part of the poster presentation. You will need to stand by your poster and communicate your story to the audience (typically 1-3 other students at any one time). You will talk to them, show them the figures and tables and data that support your conclusions and convince them that your research topic is an important issue that needs to be taken seriously in order to come to an acceptable resolution that benefits humanity, an ecosystem or the health of our planet in general. You should be prepared to answer questions and have the confidence to answer questions in a professional manner. The audience is coming to you for answers and so you should be prepared by knowing your subject matter inside and out. Everyone gets nervous standing in front of a group of people and talking. It is completely natural for you to be nervous. However, I think you’ll find that this symposium is actually fun and you have nothing to worry about. Unless, of course, you forget to print your poster and then you are completely free to “freak out” in front of us all. By the way “I didn’t have time to print my poster” or “I couldn’t print my poster because…” is NOT an acceptable excuse and you will earn 0% for your poster grade.