Now I'm going to be straight with you on this right away. This is not a blog post about me being the epitome of perfection, either as an academic student or in my approach to academic studies, nor am I claiming to be a bit easy on the eye. As the picture attached is testimony to, that ship has long since sailed (if indeed it was ever moored to the shores of female perfection in the first place). What we are talking about here is simply being a girl who has made an academic poster. I know, right!? How exciting is this!! But all joking aside, it was really rather difficult, and I think I would take another brutal round in Journal Club over making another academic poster any day of the week because poster-making is hard.
So, first things first, we must look at the brief, which was to create an academic poster in A1 size with a portrait aspect ratio. You can do this in any format you wish, but PowerPoint is recommended, and it must then be saved as a PDF, with attention being given to be sure that there are no formatting issues that arise when converting your image into a PDF. Secondly, the content of the poster must summarise your proposal for the research you will be conducting on your placement. It must be clear to read, stand alone without the need for explanation (whilst also not going into too much detail or containing too much text) and ideally have some images such as Venn diagrams, flowcharts or tables that break it up and help summarise your proposed research, but these images should have purpose and not just appear for appearance sake. Okay, it should be relatively straightforward. That would be, however, if I knew what on earth my research was going to be. The thing is that one thing I do know is that I really do not know the approach I'll be taking. The reason for this is that the research will be using a PICE approach, I will introduce PICE in its very own blog post, but for now, we'll just say that PICE is an acronym for Public Involvement and Community Engagement and that what it all boils itself down to, is that I am not in the driving seat when it comes to the design of my research. My collaborators are, and as I am yet to collaborate with my collaborators, I really don't have a Scooby Doo what I'll be doing.
So, where do you start when you don't know where you'll start? Well, you start with what you do know, and what I know is this. My research will be looking into barriers to employment for young people with learning difficulties and disabilities, and there is research that confirms that such barriers exist. Right, so there is the justification for our study. We also know that we will be working with these young individuals to build a research study that we hope will have findings that they feel will be of benefit to them. We know that previous research has, at worst, excluded them from the research process altogether, instead using others to speak on their behalf, at best including them as passive participants, not asking them what research really matters to them, so we can also mention that and provide evidence that better research strategies exist. I also know that I will be running three focus groups with my young expert collaborators to help to identify a research question and design the research itself so that can also go in my poster. Thank goodness we're finally getting somewhere, but hang on, these aren't your regular focus groups. We're not gathering data here, and we are also working in collaboration with individuals that have traditionally been considered as a group that is hard to reach... let's pop a bit about how we intend to tackle that in this poster too. But wait, it all looks like it'll be rather wordy and full of text with no images. This is going to look awful, and I'd like it to look a bit like a wall full of ideas..... then Amy exclaims, "What about post-it notes? Could you not make text boxes that look a bit like that?". Absolute genius. Shout out to Amy! I'll be using sticky notes in the focus group to help encourage discussion and keep track of ideas, which makes them both relevant and helps break up what would otherwise be nothing but a bland wall of text. I'll explain a bit about PICE and jobs a good un we've got ourselves a poster.
Now I have no idea how this is all going to pan out. The presentation is tomorrow, and I will be assessed on the grounds that it is a poster representing a proposal, and really I'm not proposing anything other than I know very little right now except where I might start. And that is actually quite a good analogy for a lot of things we have to approach throughout life, as we often do not know where we are headed, but we are certain of where we must start. And I am rather proud of my little poster. So whilst I am far from a poster girl, I am a girl who has made a poster, and that is good enough for me!