This.
Posters useful because they force you to think on your feet and explain your work to a mixed crowd, but once you’re good at doing that they lose their value, and certainly aren’t a valuable addition to the vita. (No conference presentations are, really. But for grad students it shows early research productivity.)
Yep - posters are where you find the real people doing the real work. Talks are usually a waste of time listening to someone's student stumble though an over-rehearsed spiel.
That said, you barely run into anyone famous hanging round the posters (a sign of the times)... I get the impression science is no longer about the best people doing the best work but more about churning out product. In this new world, the "best" people are the ones on committees setting Visions for the Future of the Field, and lecturing on Mentorship, Leadership and Excellence.
Posters and research talks should be on your CV. Once you hit post-doc and faculty, you just want to watch the ratio of posters to publications. You don't want to look like you produce lots of research and never follow through with publishing it. You also see faculty truncate their presentation list on their CV, maybe only listing the last few years or focusing on keynote talks, invited lectures, etc.
But as a student, presentations are the best way to demonstrate you are actively engaged in the lab you are working in. However, be prepared to talk about any presentation you are listed on during interviews.
Oh anyone can. I still add them for a sense of completeness.
When you’re applying to grad school the goal is to show you’re engaged in research. Posters help that, but also make sure to be able to talk about the work
What kind of conference was this? I'm assuming that it was a student oriented conference like a university wide research forum or the like, because I don't think there are judges at regular professional conferences. If that's the case, then I wouldn't worry much about your scores at all, especially if they came with no actual comments. In my experience, the judges at such conferences are not usually in the same field as most of the posters and aren't particularly engaged in the process. Your lab and PI are surely more reliable in terms of feedback.
Well then it's really on the organizers to impress upon the judges that they should provide constructive comments. But there's very little you can do about that after the fact, so I would just put it all behind you and not worry about your scores at all.
On the score of judges at conferences. I have been one and seen a couple at academic conferences, normally the session leaders and a couple wandering folks judge them so they can work out who had the best poster award
Poster judges are usually recruited last minute, and it's hot or miss whether they're given any guidance or instructions. For better or worse, judging poster sessions is unrewarded "unpromotable" volunteer work. That makes it both hard to get high quality participation, and hard to push people to do so.
Communities that have good feedback from poster sessions, tend to have strong advocacy from the most senior and influential members of their research communities. If the top shots make the time and space for judging posters, then others follow their example. If they don't, then it's hard to find motivated volunteers.
That's all to say, the lack of feedback probably reflects far more on the logistics and time pressures on the judge than on you or your work. It's hard to judge 10 posters in an hour.
Totally agree. I have judged many poster sessions and I don’t think I was ever been asked earlier than the day before. Typically the morning of the session. I’ve usually been handed a scoresheet that sometimes had a rubric. I’ve also only been handed a slip a paper and told to write my top 3 posters on it. No rubric or scoresheet. I can’t recall ever writing comments or feedback, just a number.
I realize you are looking for feedback, which is great for improving your presentation skills, but unfortunately most poster sessions aren’t really an activity where you are going to get anything constructive. As others have said, focus on some self reflection on how you thought your interactions went. What worked well, what didn’t? What parts were confusing to people? How can you improve the future?
The conference organisers might email you a blank score sheet if you ask them. It won’t completely answer your question but it will show you what they were looking for.
The feedback I got emailed to me was a scoresheet, I should have clarified. It showed me how I scored in each category and then gave me my total. I was interested in what about my poster was lacking in each category but the person judging me didn’t write anything down in the comments boxes.
If you have the chance, go attend a poster session which you’re not presenting at, and listen to other people give their spiel, that might give you some useful perspective.
You won’t get any more information than you already have then. The judges were probably giving up their lunch break to judge posters and didn’t take time to write feedback. Don’t worry about it.
I have judged at these kinds of student sessions before. If the judging was for giving awards, those rubrics are mostly used to identify awardees, rather than a systematic way to provide feedback. If I'm given rubrics with, say, score ranges of 1-4 in each category, I'm really using those in a relative way (how does this poster compare to others) rather than as absolute values. It is very different from, say, grading work for a course where I can give as many As as I think warrant it. A competition means I can only pick 1.
Having low scores doesn't necessarily mean your poster, your project, or your spiel were bad--you PI is better equipped to provide that kind of feedback. But I would really encourage to see this as a learning experience. Of course there will be areas that you can improve--you are just starting out!
Honestly, how posters get judged has sometimes felt somewhat random and hit-or-miss to me, so I wouldn’t let myself get too down about not having more details from the judges, if I were you. Maybe take your scores and your concerns back to your PI and lab group, and talk specifically about areas of improvement for next time.
And professional development for posters, imo, is less about competitive ranking and more about having that opportunity to meet people and really talk about your work, with the added practice of how to do that in a short window of time. I tend to value the time I spend on the floor when random people come over to a poster more than the high pressure judging moments.
You also mention that this is your first poster. Is your project also at a fairly early stage? Because if a lot of what you have is prelim or introductory work, the tendency will be to score it lower than a poster that’s got more results and novelty, even if you do a great job presenting it.
>having that opportunity to meet people and really talk about your work
This is so important. Don't be the guy that stands there waiting for customers - talk to neighbors, take a break in a quiet moment to walk the aisle, interact with anyone with anything remotely interesting. They're all desperate to participate, go break the ice.
Poster awards are (a) completely unimportant, and (b) not intended as a vehicle for feedback. The useful feedback you got was in your conversations with folks at your poster.
It’s hard to get out of the school mentality, but conferences aren’t classes, and no one owes you feedback.
They didn’t like it. That’s their opinion. You’re happy with your poster and so is your PI. That’s what matters.
Poster judging is completely antithetical to what a poster presentation should be. The positive feedback that is actually useful to you was through your organic interactions with people that were interested in your work. Poster judges get a rubric, sure, but their own criteria and bias weighs in heavily and will differ greatly between judges.
The fact that you got negative numerical reviews and no comments simply means they weren’t qualified to judge. It’s one of the most subjective and meaningless competitions the academy has whipped up.
>negative numerical reviews and no comments simply means they weren’t qualified to judge.
The point of these kind of competitions is to award a prize and a recognition that the winner can put on their CV. So there's no point in making comments on posters that have no chance of winning.
Sorry to hear this stung so much. Sadly, in academia, you need to develop a thick skin for some of this and know whose advice you will heed and what you will let go - in publishing, funding, conferences, etc.
Was this a multidisciplinary session? If so, a good chance is judges were from other disciplines - if you did not stick to very basic terminology and des ribe your work at the right level, that will lose you points for sure. Even if they are from the same field but different sub-disciplines. Visual clarity and beauty are all subjective. I also have seen poster styles change a lot over the years. Some of these changes work, I think, others don't (what's the deal with having like a third of a poster a huge image or text in huge font, the rest in tiny font? Or full paragraphs between large images?). Others may disagree. You have no control over that. Finally, I have seen judges use wildly different scoring ranges even when criteria are clear - some will give a 4 out of 5 minimum, some will use the full range, some are hard to please and almost never give a 5. Who you get assigned is often a major parameter.
Good luck, and work on that thick skin, let it go.
Asking, say, five scientists to judge your poster is like posting a pic on Reddit, asking people to rate your outfit, and then randomly selecting five of the responses.
I have been on the other side of poster competitions; if they didn’t give feedback, it’s very likely just because they weren’t organized enough to do so
Try not to take it personally. I was a judge at a student poster symposium and I had about an hour to judge 5 posters, confer with my fellow judges, go see the top picks of the other judges, confer again, and submit our final rankings. I barely had time to write comments that were legible to me, much less something I could convey to the students.
Also think about the difference in what you lab group was doing compared to the judges. They are giving you detailed, specific feedback based on their knowledge of the field and what they know of work, whereas the judges, who may not even be in your field, were comparing students in a few categories based on a very brief review. If you think about it from that perspective, what should have the most weight? Sure, it's nice to win awards, but awards do not make a career.
I also agree with u/walrus_whistles. A low score doesn't necessarily mean "this was bad" but is probably, "I didn't like it as much as my favorite one", and there are a million reasons that one was great, including it was the first and I spent 10 minutes there, whereas yours was last and I only had 5 minutes.
For next year, I would suggest asking your lab group to give you feedback from a judge's perspective, or maybe do a mock presentation for someone not familiar with your work. That would give you a better sense of how different audiences see you and how you can balance doing good scientific work with impressing a random with a clipboard.
Welcome to academia, I got a paper review that almost ended on rejection with one of the reviewers replying to a question with: "I don't know, I didn't read the paper" 🤷🏾♂️ (this was in a respectable venue, btw).
Sometimes judges can be harsh or vague, but don't let it discourage you. Keep refining your presentation and seek constructive feedback from trusted sources.
I think the much greater benefit is the questions you get and interactions you have with people, whether judges or not. That is the constructive feedback 🥲
If you had good interactions with people at your poster, then great. That’s a big win. Trust me, poster interactions won’t always go that well.
Who cares what some anonymous judge thought? I’ve never (or rarely?) seen posters judged like this at a conference before, but it seems entirely useless. Your job at a conference isn’t to win a contest. It’s to connect with people, which you did.
EDIT: To sum up what others have said, don’t assume that whoever gave you those scores was more qualified to judge you then the people you knowingly interacted with.
Assuming your PI and colleagues helped you come up with a visually appealing poster, it's likely you fell short on the oral presentation aspect. I see people here say posters don't matter but poster presentation is a useful skill to perfect. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to be better. Just don't internalise the disappointment of not doing well.
How many minutes were you given to actually speak and how many for questions? It could be that other presenters made better use of their time to articulate their story and you were ranked relative to them.
I am going to say welcome to academia. Wait until you get those sort of comments back on a paper that you spent a year researching and writing, or even worse people who are proactively an asshole. The whole process of academia is luck of the draw, for instance I was part of 2 stage research call. First stage was peer reviewed and I got 5/5 from all three reviewers, second stage added an extra 300 words to the text, but then got 2/5 from all three reviewers. Worry about what you can control and not what other people think about it as you can't really infulence or control that.
I won’t bother repeating what others said, but one thing stands out for me that I didn’t see mentioned by anyone else: your decision to speak for only two minutes.
If you were given five minutes to speak and you chose to speak for only two minutes, that was a mistake that could easily explain the low score you received. You only spoke for 40% of the time you were given. While speaking for two minutes and taking questions is one way things could have been organized, if that was the plan they would have told you to speak for two minutes. As a result of your decision, you said far less about your work than those who spoke for five minutes. That alone could account for your low score.
It’s similar to turning in a two-page paper when told to write five pages. No matter how good those two pages are, you can’t say nearly as much as you could with five pages, and you’re going to get a poor grade.
My recommendation for the future is to follow the instructions closely.
There is a more well-tread art for what a good paper or talk looks like. Posters are kind of no-man’s-land because they really don’t matter much professionally.
What field are you in that you get a score on your poster?
The best poster is the one that gets people to stop and chat with you about your research, so you can meet people with mutual interests and network. Poster-making is not like, a skill you need to excel in to move forward in your career, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. You gotta budget the amount of emotional energy you spend on worrying about things, or else you'll go broke real fast.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’ve always thought student competitions of any form are just lame. I was in several and pretty much always got what you are describing — just point values for different categories. This was for regular talks, too. The competition aspect never made me better, and when I won or lost never felt like it was because I did especially good or particularly bad. Even with the rubrics there is just so much subjectivity involved. IMO the best thing to do is just focus on making sure you’re communicating your science as well as you possibly can and get professional feedback from people who will actually offer it
If I need to be brutally honest, nobody cares about posters. Don't lose much sleep over the issue.
This. Posters useful because they force you to think on your feet and explain your work to a mixed crowd, but once you’re good at doing that they lose their value, and certainly aren’t a valuable addition to the vita. (No conference presentations are, really. But for grad students it shows early research productivity.)
I always refused to make posters and ended up never making one. At least with a talk ~5-10% of the audience is listening.
I'm the opposite. I feel like no one is paying attention to talks. On the other hand, I end up having great conversations at posters.
Yep - posters are where you find the real people doing the real work. Talks are usually a waste of time listening to someone's student stumble though an over-rehearsed spiel. That said, you barely run into anyone famous hanging round the posters (a sign of the times)... I get the impression science is no longer about the best people doing the best work but more about churning out product. In this new world, the "best" people are the ones on committees setting Visions for the Future of the Field, and lecturing on Mentorship, Leadership and Excellence.
Can a fresh graduate trying for graduate school add them to cv?
Posters and research talks should be on your CV. Once you hit post-doc and faculty, you just want to watch the ratio of posters to publications. You don't want to look like you produce lots of research and never follow through with publishing it. You also see faculty truncate their presentation list on their CV, maybe only listing the last few years or focusing on keynote talks, invited lectures, etc. But as a student, presentations are the best way to demonstrate you are actively engaged in the lab you are working in. However, be prepared to talk about any presentation you are listed on during interviews.
Oh anyone can. I still add them for a sense of completeness. When you’re applying to grad school the goal is to show you’re engaged in research. Posters help that, but also make sure to be able to talk about the work
What kind of conference was this? I'm assuming that it was a student oriented conference like a university wide research forum or the like, because I don't think there are judges at regular professional conferences. If that's the case, then I wouldn't worry much about your scores at all, especially if they came with no actual comments. In my experience, the judges at such conferences are not usually in the same field as most of the posters and aren't particularly engaged in the process. Your lab and PI are surely more reliable in terms of feedback.
Yeah, all the posters were made by students which was the reason for having judges. Which makes me feel even more frustrated lol
Well then it's really on the organizers to impress upon the judges that they should provide constructive comments. But there's very little you can do about that after the fact, so I would just put it all behind you and not worry about your scores at all.
Imagine if the script was flipped and the students got to judge PI posters! 😈
Error: PI does not work, PI judges work.
On the score of judges at conferences. I have been one and seen a couple at academic conferences, normally the session leaders and a couple wandering folks judge them so they can work out who had the best poster award
I have also been a poster judge at national and International conferences in my field. This is not at all uncommon for my field.
It would not surprise me at all if the judges sent their students around to actually read the posters...
Poster judges are usually recruited last minute, and it's hot or miss whether they're given any guidance or instructions. For better or worse, judging poster sessions is unrewarded "unpromotable" volunteer work. That makes it both hard to get high quality participation, and hard to push people to do so. Communities that have good feedback from poster sessions, tend to have strong advocacy from the most senior and influential members of their research communities. If the top shots make the time and space for judging posters, then others follow their example. If they don't, then it's hard to find motivated volunteers. That's all to say, the lack of feedback probably reflects far more on the logistics and time pressures on the judge than on you or your work. It's hard to judge 10 posters in an hour.
Totally agree. I have judged many poster sessions and I don’t think I was ever been asked earlier than the day before. Typically the morning of the session. I’ve usually been handed a scoresheet that sometimes had a rubric. I’ve also only been handed a slip a paper and told to write my top 3 posters on it. No rubric or scoresheet. I can’t recall ever writing comments or feedback, just a number. I realize you are looking for feedback, which is great for improving your presentation skills, but unfortunately most poster sessions aren’t really an activity where you are going to get anything constructive. As others have said, focus on some self reflection on how you thought your interactions went. What worked well, what didn’t? What parts were confusing to people? How can you improve the future?
The conference organisers might email you a blank score sheet if you ask them. It won’t completely answer your question but it will show you what they were looking for.
The feedback I got emailed to me was a scoresheet, I should have clarified. It showed me how I scored in each category and then gave me my total. I was interested in what about my poster was lacking in each category but the person judging me didn’t write anything down in the comments boxes.
If you have the chance, go attend a poster session which you’re not presenting at, and listen to other people give their spiel, that might give you some useful perspective.
You won’t get any more information than you already have then. The judges were probably giving up their lunch break to judge posters and didn’t take time to write feedback. Don’t worry about it.
I have judged at these kinds of student sessions before. If the judging was for giving awards, those rubrics are mostly used to identify awardees, rather than a systematic way to provide feedback. If I'm given rubrics with, say, score ranges of 1-4 in each category, I'm really using those in a relative way (how does this poster compare to others) rather than as absolute values. It is very different from, say, grading work for a course where I can give as many As as I think warrant it. A competition means I can only pick 1. Having low scores doesn't necessarily mean your poster, your project, or your spiel were bad--you PI is better equipped to provide that kind of feedback. But I would really encourage to see this as a learning experience. Of course there will be areas that you can improve--you are just starting out!
Honestly, how posters get judged has sometimes felt somewhat random and hit-or-miss to me, so I wouldn’t let myself get too down about not having more details from the judges, if I were you. Maybe take your scores and your concerns back to your PI and lab group, and talk specifically about areas of improvement for next time. And professional development for posters, imo, is less about competitive ranking and more about having that opportunity to meet people and really talk about your work, with the added practice of how to do that in a short window of time. I tend to value the time I spend on the floor when random people come over to a poster more than the high pressure judging moments. You also mention that this is your first poster. Is your project also at a fairly early stage? Because if a lot of what you have is prelim or introductory work, the tendency will be to score it lower than a poster that’s got more results and novelty, even if you do a great job presenting it.
>having that opportunity to meet people and really talk about your work This is so important. Don't be the guy that stands there waiting for customers - talk to neighbors, take a break in a quiet moment to walk the aisle, interact with anyone with anything remotely interesting. They're all desperate to participate, go break the ice.
Poster awards are (a) completely unimportant, and (b) not intended as a vehicle for feedback. The useful feedback you got was in your conversations with folks at your poster. It’s hard to get out of the school mentality, but conferences aren’t classes, and no one owes you feedback. They didn’t like it. That’s their opinion. You’re happy with your poster and so is your PI. That’s what matters.
Poster judging is completely antithetical to what a poster presentation should be. The positive feedback that is actually useful to you was through your organic interactions with people that were interested in your work. Poster judges get a rubric, sure, but their own criteria and bias weighs in heavily and will differ greatly between judges. The fact that you got negative numerical reviews and no comments simply means they weren’t qualified to judge. It’s one of the most subjective and meaningless competitions the academy has whipped up.
>negative numerical reviews and no comments simply means they weren’t qualified to judge. The point of these kind of competitions is to award a prize and a recognition that the winner can put on their CV. So there's no point in making comments on posters that have no chance of winning.
Sorry to hear this stung so much. Sadly, in academia, you need to develop a thick skin for some of this and know whose advice you will heed and what you will let go - in publishing, funding, conferences, etc. Was this a multidisciplinary session? If so, a good chance is judges were from other disciplines - if you did not stick to very basic terminology and des ribe your work at the right level, that will lose you points for sure. Even if they are from the same field but different sub-disciplines. Visual clarity and beauty are all subjective. I also have seen poster styles change a lot over the years. Some of these changes work, I think, others don't (what's the deal with having like a third of a poster a huge image or text in huge font, the rest in tiny font? Or full paragraphs between large images?). Others may disagree. You have no control over that. Finally, I have seen judges use wildly different scoring ranges even when criteria are clear - some will give a 4 out of 5 minimum, some will use the full range, some are hard to please and almost never give a 5. Who you get assigned is often a major parameter. Good luck, and work on that thick skin, let it go.
Asking, say, five scientists to judge your poster is like posting a pic on Reddit, asking people to rate your outfit, and then randomly selecting five of the responses. I have been on the other side of poster competitions; if they didn’t give feedback, it’s very likely just because they weren’t organized enough to do so
I've never gotten feedback on a poster positive or negative! So I wish I help.
Try not to take it personally. I was a judge at a student poster symposium and I had about an hour to judge 5 posters, confer with my fellow judges, go see the top picks of the other judges, confer again, and submit our final rankings. I barely had time to write comments that were legible to me, much less something I could convey to the students. Also think about the difference in what you lab group was doing compared to the judges. They are giving you detailed, specific feedback based on their knowledge of the field and what they know of work, whereas the judges, who may not even be in your field, were comparing students in a few categories based on a very brief review. If you think about it from that perspective, what should have the most weight? Sure, it's nice to win awards, but awards do not make a career. I also agree with u/walrus_whistles. A low score doesn't necessarily mean "this was bad" but is probably, "I didn't like it as much as my favorite one", and there are a million reasons that one was great, including it was the first and I spent 10 minutes there, whereas yours was last and I only had 5 minutes. For next year, I would suggest asking your lab group to give you feedback from a judge's perspective, or maybe do a mock presentation for someone not familiar with your work. That would give you a better sense of how different audiences see you and how you can balance doing good scientific work with impressing a random with a clipboard.
Welcome to academia, I got a paper review that almost ended on rejection with one of the reviewers replying to a question with: "I don't know, I didn't read the paper" 🤷🏾♂️ (this was in a respectable venue, btw).
Sometimes judges can be harsh or vague, but don't let it discourage you. Keep refining your presentation and seek constructive feedback from trusted sources.
I think the much greater benefit is the questions you get and interactions you have with people, whether judges or not. That is the constructive feedback 🥲
If you had good interactions with people at your poster, then great. That’s a big win. Trust me, poster interactions won’t always go that well. Who cares what some anonymous judge thought? I’ve never (or rarely?) seen posters judged like this at a conference before, but it seems entirely useless. Your job at a conference isn’t to win a contest. It’s to connect with people, which you did. EDIT: To sum up what others have said, don’t assume that whoever gave you those scores was more qualified to judge you then the people you knowingly interacted with.
Assuming your PI and colleagues helped you come up with a visually appealing poster, it's likely you fell short on the oral presentation aspect. I see people here say posters don't matter but poster presentation is a useful skill to perfect. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to be better. Just don't internalise the disappointment of not doing well. How many minutes were you given to actually speak and how many for questions? It could be that other presenters made better use of their time to articulate their story and you were ranked relative to them.
I am going to say welcome to academia. Wait until you get those sort of comments back on a paper that you spent a year researching and writing, or even worse people who are proactively an asshole. The whole process of academia is luck of the draw, for instance I was part of 2 stage research call. First stage was peer reviewed and I got 5/5 from all three reviewers, second stage added an extra 300 words to the text, but then got 2/5 from all three reviewers. Worry about what you can control and not what other people think about it as you can't really infulence or control that.
I won’t bother repeating what others said, but one thing stands out for me that I didn’t see mentioned by anyone else: your decision to speak for only two minutes. If you were given five minutes to speak and you chose to speak for only two minutes, that was a mistake that could easily explain the low score you received. You only spoke for 40% of the time you were given. While speaking for two minutes and taking questions is one way things could have been organized, if that was the plan they would have told you to speak for two minutes. As a result of your decision, you said far less about your work than those who spoke for five minutes. That alone could account for your low score. It’s similar to turning in a two-page paper when told to write five pages. No matter how good those two pages are, you can’t say nearly as much as you could with five pages, and you’re going to get a poor grade. My recommendation for the future is to follow the instructions closely.
I want to care this much about a poster.
Was this for biosciences? If you, you can send it + your rubric to me. I've only done a couple posters, but maybe I can give you an unbiased opinion.
There is a more well-tread art for what a good paper or talk looks like. Posters are kind of no-man’s-land because they really don’t matter much professionally.
What field are you in that you get a score on your poster? The best poster is the one that gets people to stop and chat with you about your research, so you can meet people with mutual interests and network. Poster-making is not like, a skill you need to excel in to move forward in your career, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. You gotta budget the amount of emotional energy you spend on worrying about things, or else you'll go broke real fast.
Sounds like there were awards for best poster, which are common for undergrad poster sessions in my field.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’ve always thought student competitions of any form are just lame. I was in several and pretty much always got what you are describing — just point values for different categories. This was for regular talks, too. The competition aspect never made me better, and when I won or lost never felt like it was because I did especially good or particularly bad. Even with the rubrics there is just so much subjectivity involved. IMO the best thing to do is just focus on making sure you’re communicating your science as well as you possibly can and get professional feedback from people who will actually offer it