Research Students' Symposium

Introduction

The research school runs an annual symposium, at which research students present their ongoing work. The symposium is usually three days long, starting from end of October. As a first year student, you are recommended to attend all talks and the poster session, and have a chat with 2nd and 3rd year research students. You will definitely get benefits from this. See also Assignment 1 of the COMP7000 research seminar for further info on what you should do during the Symposium.

Guidelines on Poster Presentation

The following is some information about the poster presentation. For further questions please seek advice from your supervisor, your colleagues in your group and the mentors.

• The most important guideline is: there are no firm guidelines. In contrast to the talks, which are more formal in format, the poster session is largely informal, it is most successful when it's lively, and chatty, and hence, enjoyable.
• The second important guideline is: members of your research group and your supervisor are the best people with whom to discuss options, ask opinions, get feedback, seek support, seek examples, seek funding for production, etc. Research in this Department is done through research groups which have a great degree of autonomy. For example, money is devolved to research group accounts to support each and every PhD student. The members of the research group are also assumed to be the primary sounding board and support group for PhD students.
• The third guideline is: on almost all matters in your dealings with events determined by the research school (of which the Symposium is one) your supervisor(s) is(are) your first port of call. You could do much worse than asking her/him/them before you ask anyone else.
• The final guideline is: use the mentoring scheme. The mentors are PhD students who, among them, will be able to tell you how it happened in their case when faced with the same situation you're facing now.

Make a Poster

Here are the questions we have been ased on making a poster:

• Poster Dimensions
  A2 would be the most sensible (use A1 and there may not be enough display space in the panel, use A3 and you may not have enough content space in the poster)
• Poster Printing
  There's no school facility for doing anything fancy as far as we are aware. MCC does have sophisticated printing facilities but the Symposium organizer and the Research School cannot help you there: seek the views of your supervisor first and foremost. MCC prints and laminates posters only up to A3. Ask at their reception desk for more details, or go directly to their print room if you know where it is. If you must have a larger poster, the Media Center of the University of Manchester has facilities to print and laminate posters up to A0 in size.
• Poster Design
  Here guideline 1 above applies in full force. Some people have lots of pictures, others have graphs, others have diagrams, others only formulas, and ultimately some only have words. People who are lucky enough to have lots of visual information to convey may well choose to indulge in fancy design alternatives. One low key approach that many people choose to use is to rely on presentation software (e.g., Powerpoint, or its Unix equivalents) and design the poster content as a presentation.