ah, university research departments … ever keen to build links to the outside world that doesn’t understand their research. However an open evening with the local (to Milton Keynes) British Computer Society invited should be about as good a match as possible.

I’d been asked to prepare a poster which is, as the name suggests, an A0 (about 84 x 119cm) graphic explaining your research. The idea is that at conferences these posters are pinned up with the aim of catching someones eye and giving you chance to talk about your work and maybe invite them to a talk or something. Basically - publicity. I actually enjoy doing design and layout stuff but had forgotten how long it can take. There is a rather perfectionist streak in me that gets well triggered dealing with images and text, but got the thing done, sent and printed. It’s not as I’d want, but good enough. It doesn’t help that at this early stage of the study I’ve only got a rough set of ideas and no substantial conclusions. But some pretty pictures can help…

The actual evening was better than I’d imagined with chance to talk with some other students and some BCS members, swapping emails and so on. And got a positive comment about the design and pretty pictures, so a bonus there! On reflection it was good to try my hand at the poster thing in a nice low-key, home turf kind of way before trying elsewhere and checking out the other posters I think I can improve, especially once I have some clear results.