How to prepare a poster (and pitch!) for a research symposium
At an IJSCAR symposium, “poster session” doesn’t mean printing anything out and pinning it to a corkboard — you’ll be in a small Zoom breakout room, sharing your screen, and talking to your peers and judges through your work in real time. That changes what a “poster” should actually look like: it’s less a standalone document and more a visual aid for a conversation. Think of it as the thing on screen behind you while you explain your research out loud.
We looked at how established venues like ACM SRC and ACM CHI structure their poster requirements, and adapted the parts that make sense for a virtual, small-group format like ours. Physical poster boards have to be a certain size in centimeters; a screen share doesn’t. What carries over is the content a strong poster needs to communicate, and the expectation that you can also talk about your work without any slides at all.
What to prepare
You have two acceptable formats — use whichever fits your work better:
- A one-page PDF poster, laid out like a traditional research poster (title bar across the top, the rest organized into sections), or
- One or two slides (PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Canva all work), designed as a visual walkthrough of your project rather than a wall of bullet points.
Because this will be viewed over a screen share rather than printed, design for a screen, not a poster board: use a landscape/widescreen layout, and keep text large enough to read at a glance — headers around 32-40pt and body text no smaller than 24pt is a good rule of thumb. Favor a few clear figures, diagrams, or screenshots over dense paragraphs; if a judge or peer has to squint or read for a full minute before you start talking, the poster isn’t doing its job.
Suggested sections
Not every project will need every section below, and that’s fine — this is meant as a menu to draw from, not a rigid template. Most strong posters end up including most of these:
- Title and author(s). Your name, school (if you’d like), and a title that says what the project is about, not just the general topic area.
- Problem statement. What question or gap in the world (or in existing research) are you addressing? A sentence or two is often enough.
- Research question(s) or hypothesis. What, specifically, are you trying to find out or test?
- Related work / state of the art. A brief note on what’s already known or already been tried, and where your project fits in relative to it. This doesn’t need to be exhaustive — a few key references are plenty.
- Design and methods. How did you (or will you) actually investigate the question — your approach, data, tools, or experimental setup.
- Results. What did you find? If your project is still in progress, this section can be “anticipated results” or preliminary findings instead — that’s completely welcome at IJSCAR symposia.
- Conclusion / next steps. What do your results mean, and what would you do next if you kept working on this?
The pitches you’ll need, poster or no poster
Regardless of which format you choose, come prepared with two spoken pitches. Judges may ask for either one at any point, and having them ready (and practiced out loud, not just written down) makes a real difference:
- A 30-second elevator pitch. If a stranger asked “so what’s your project about?” in a hallway, what would you say before they walked away? This should cover the problem, your approach, and why it matters — in plain language, no jargon, memorized well enough that it doesn’t sound memorized.
- A 2-minute pitch. This is the elevator pitch expanded into a short walkthrough: the problem, the gap in existing work, what you did, what you found (or expect to find), and why it matters. A useful way to build this is to give yourself roughly 20-30 seconds per section above and then time yourself — it’s very easy to run long on the first try.
Why bother with all this
Being able to explain your work clearly, at multiple lengths, to people who haven’t read your paper is its own skill — one you’ll use again at every future symposium, interview, or lab meeting, long after this particular project is finished. A good poster session is really a conversation with good visual backup, so put more of your prep time into being able to talk fluently about your work than into perfecting slide design.
Good luck, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you’ve been working on!