Hello, my name is Caroline Kane and we're here to talk with you about faculty judging of posters at scientific conferences. And faculty will judge posters in many different ways, but the guidelines that we will give you, especially those of you who are new, as well as students, we hope will be helpful in making your judging experience Pleasant for you as well as pleasant for the students. Let me introduce my colleague, Professor Rudy Ortiz from UC Merced, who also is going to be helping in explaining to you some of the vagaries and pleasures of judging posters. What I can tell you is that in a faculty-centric poster judging, this is a poster judging form, the faculty get to pick which posters they will judge. But to be sure that there's clarity and that we know which students are actually being judged, we're also given a sticker that will have the student's name as well as the student's topic to put on top of the judging sheet right away so that we can stay organized and be sure that the student has the proper score at the end.
But then to judging posters, there are three main categories that I look for in a poster. The first comes when I'm approaching the poster, looking at the poster composition and its clarity. The second, which is the most important actually, is the student and the student's ability to put the science in a context and describe the science, what he or she has done in the science, and take us through the poster with the same clarity that I, or better clarity, than I see on the poster. And then the third, is the general communication and professionalism skills that the student expresses during the poster judging.
The science is the primary feature and the student talking about the science is in many ways even more important than the poster layout itself. Now we'd like to go through some of the things that contribute to a good poster and the features that we look for when we're judging a poster. Rudy, why don't we start with you? So taking this as an example, I like the way the layout is very open. Each section of the poster is very well described and it's an easy to read.
It flows well in a logical fashion, logical order. And I would add too that the Poster actually is in an area of science that's distinct from my own, and yet I'm able to come up to this poster and by looking at the introduction and the conclusions, I'm able to get some idea about how well the student actually understands what's going on in the science. The color scheme is nice, that may sound trivial when you're evaluating the science, but it's not because the poster is a communication tool as well. Background and then right into the methodology. This is something that when the student does arrive to talk with us about his poster, we'll expect him to be able to flow as easily between them as we can now look at the poster when he's not here too.
This poster is a very busy poster and yet it's arranged to me in such ways that there are nice bullet points clearly marked. Graphs, but not too many graphs, and then a nice series of conclusions. I agree.
That's very important, especially if it's outside of your discipline. To be able to read it and still be able to take something away, that's very, very important because when you're at a meeting, you don't know who's going to be judging your posters, and a lot of times it's somebody outside of your discipline. So if you're able to convey your science to somebody outside, that's really important. So I think that's a clear strength of the poster.
But one of the things that I would advise is there are a lot of figures here. And it's hard to, you know, we're standing close to it so it's very easy for us to see this. But usually the judges aren't going to be able to get this close if it's a busy meeting. So the figures need to possibly be a little bit bigger and it would help to be able to see it from, you know, if you're standing three or four feet away. That certainly is true because if a poster is popular for either...
the faculty judges or for other students who want to see it, they won't be able to, especially with older judges, have the clarity of this particular font. Although this font does satisfy the kind of minimum requirements. It looks like it's about a 16-point font for most of the text and it should be that or larger on almost all counts.
Two other things I think are really nice about this poster. is the outline of the future work and the way the acknowledgements are put together. And so what you've heard us talking about to this point are features of a poster that you should pay attention to, I pay attention to at least, and Rudy pays attention to, when we are evaluating how well a student has done in the science.
And now what we'd like to do is switch to having just the two of us evaluating the poster in a vacuum, to having the most important feature of a poster judging, and that is the young scientist himself. So we look forward to talking with Stephen Chavez. I want to welcome Stephen Chavez, who's the student who put together this poster. Stephen is a senior at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and he also did this work up at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at the Lawrence Berkeley.
national laboratories. What you're going to see is just a capsule of what would happen in an actual judging situation where somewhat fewer questions will be asked, but at the same time Rudy and I are really asking these questions out of genuine interest and they are the types of questions that judges would ask. Rudy.
Yeah, Stephen, congratulations. This is a nice poster. Well done.
Let me ask you quickly What is the rationale behind the design of the poster and this layout? So as a student, the main thing you want to do when you're presenting is get across your science to the judge. And by picking a really organized and easy to follow layout, the judge can focus more on what you're actually saying rather than trying to find everything on your poster. That's a really important feature of scientific communication.
Let me ask you why you picked this particular project to begin with. All right, so that's easy. I'm actually also a material scientist. So this project, artificial photosynthesis, combines everything I'm interested in. And that's basically why I was able to do such great work.
And I am a biochemist and biologist, much less of an engineer. And your poster is actually very good at using terminology that someone with a general science education would understand, except. I don't understand what a sacrificial reagent is in the context of the current voltage characterization. So could you explain that please? Okay, so very briefly in terms of this project, what I used the sacrificial reagent for is I used it as a baseline against what are called standard reagents.
And by comparing the data between the two, we can really see how efficient these devices are. The other thing I really liked about your poster was the way that you outlined future work. And I'm wondering how you picked the particular areas of future work. So the future work directly parallels this project that I did here.
It just takes it to the next level in terms of materials design and efficiency parameters. And by exploring these things, we can make these devices as efficient as possible. So thank you very much for letting us judge your poster. And the final thing a judge does before the judge leaves... This puts dots at the upper right hand corner of the poster so that both the student as well as others in the poster area will know that the student's poster has been judged by two individuals.
I want to thank you very much for the participating in the video, but also for the nice work that you've done and the way it's really nicely displayed. So I appreciate that very much. Thank you for having me. And Rudy, I appreciate your being involved in the filming too to try and help the... Next generation of judges, enjoy the poster session as do we and also that the students might enjoy the poster session even more and understand what goes into making a first rate poster.
Thank you very much.