On the way to the FAMOS School and Workshop

Here I am. It’s 6:31 am, and I’m on the way to Bremen airport to take my first flight to Frankfurt, and then FRaNKFuRT-BoSToN. Honestly, I’m excited-nervous. This will be my first time in USA. I’m going to the FAMOS school and workshop. FAMOS is the acronym for Forum for ArcticModelling & Observational Synthesis, and it has become a very important meeting for Arctic Ocean climate.

Tomorrow, the FAMOS School starts. Although I’m not a PhD student, I wanted to attend because the school consists of a series of one-hour lectures given by very good and reputed Arctic Ocean researchers. So, simply I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to listen all of them. On Wednesday, the workshop starts with just a few talks in each topic, but with long time for discussion and poster sessions until Friday when the workshop ends.

My poster is titled ‘Changes in deep convection in the Greenland Sea since the 1980s’. In it, I explain what you already know about ‘the strong warming and saltening of the deep Greenland Sea’ and about ‘the causes for the halt of deep convection’ responsible for those changes in the Greenland Sea deep waters. The last time that I prepared a poster was at least 3 years ago. So, it has taken me longer than expected to finish it. Here, I leave some tips that I try to not forget when doing a poster, although some of them I accomplish better than others 

• Regarding content: Poster should have more description than a talk slide but less than a paper. Do not put too much information and try to focus on one single message (This is my weak point). 
• Regarding format to attract your audience: They must have a prominent title and not too much text (large fonts easily readable); high quality figures/photos; and a clear and open layout.
• They should be logically organized. For me, starting to sketch my poster on paper is very useful. Then, I try to organize figures and key messages, and once I have a clear idea how to organize the content that I want to present, I put everything in my poster slide. By the way, I use PowerPoint to prepare my posters and oral presentations.

Finally, that’s how my poster looks like. I think that’s enough to have an idea about how I have organize and formatted it. Sorry, that I don’t show you the version in which you can read it, but I can’t because part of the information is not published yet. In order to publish a new manuscript you are asked if the information has been already published somewhere, and the blog is definitively ‘somewhere’.

FAMOS poster. Source: Raquel Somavilla

What about you? Do you prepare posters too? Do you have other tips?