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3-minute summary of my PhD journey

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Lessons that I learned from my first PhD poster presentation

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Last month, I attended  the PhD day in BAM together with other three ESRs (Xin Wang, Joyraj Chakraborty, Imane Bayane). I presented my poster here based on my paper "Damage detection and deteriorating structural systems". I got some comments and feedback that I would like to share with all of you in this post.

  • Preparing your welcoming sentence

At first, I just stood besides my poster and I was thinking people may ask me if they have any questions. But the truth is if you don't speak, viewers will quickly pass through your poster and move to the next stand. So it is better to take the initiative to talk to others. It may be little embarrassing for you at the beginning, but you have to be brave to sell yourself and your ideas.


If you prepare a good welcoming sentence, things will become much easier. Since my poster is about quantification the damage detection value of a bridge to help make better decision, so I opened my speech with the sentence like: Do you want to know how the bridge manager make an inspection plan? People may be curious about your question and then you can start your speech.

  • Preparing your presentation in 1-3 minutes

There are so many posters in the sections, people may not spend too much time on any single poster. So it is better to prepare you poster presentation in 1-3 minutes to attract people's attention. The audience may came from different background, so it requires you to prepare your speech as simple as possible.


I know it is very difficult to shorten our work into 1-3 minutes, you can not explain everything, so there is need to make priority for what you want to say. For my case, I spoke more about why it is needed to this research and what benefits that we can archieve at the end.

  • Preparing your poster with less texts

The last suggestion is from my supervisor:

The viewer (not a reader!) should be able to grasp all in 30 sec. Please work with bullet points, only few full sentences, larger font, larger and fewer pictures.

Below there are two posters, the left is my poster and the right is awarded as the best poster during the PhD day. It is good to know the difference, at least next time I will know how to improve if I want to make other poster.


Hope you enjoy the reading and I wish it could be helpful for you to prepare a poster presentation.

Comments

  1. Mariia7 December 2017 at 02:27

    Lijia, you are giving so good advices! Thank you =)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous3 September 2018 at 05:22

    This is a very good writing. kindly share more such useful information PhD Thesis Writing Services in India

    ReplyDelete

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