Presenting Posters & Pitching

Would you like to become more effective at selling your ideas, yourself and broadening your professional network? In this course, you will learn how modern academics use poster presentations to bring their ideas to a wider audience and develop professional relationships.

Designing a poster is different from designing presentation slides and pitching is not simply presenting. Poster presentations are an opportunity to offer a snapshot of your work and engage other professionals in dialogue. How effective you are at pitching your work and presenting yourself will usually determine the number and quality of your future professional relationships.

By the end of this course you will understand how to
• design an effective poster presentation
• develop a pitch
• inspire and engage instead of teach
• express your passion
• interact with your audience in a natural and purposeful way
• give and receive feedback on your posters and poster pitch.

What does the course involve?
During this course you will design your own poster presentation and an accompanying pitch. You will learn how to persuasively inspire and engage your audience in your subject and communicate your passion. You will practice your pitching and networking skills by presenting your poster and interacting with your audience in a natural and goal-oriented way. Throughout this course, you will receive high quality individual feedback to help you develop an awareness of your strengths and weaknesses as a poster presenter, and you will be graded based on your performance in a final poster pitching session.

Teacher
The instructor for this course will be Caro Struijke. Caro Struijke teaches a wide variety of academic communication skills in English, ranging from scientific writing courses to PhD candidates, poster pitching workshops to honour students, and popular science writing courses to master students. She also coaches individuals, such as professors preparing their inaugural speech. Caro holds a degree in English (University of Amsterdam), a master’s degree in applied linguistics (University College of North Wales) and a PhD in theoretical linguistics (University of Maryland). She greatly enjoys helping academics communicate their ideas effectively and improve their English language skills in the process.

Schedule
This course is offered twice on two separate days of the week. The course consists of five sessions which will take place on Monday evenings evenings between 18:30 and 20:30:
Monday 6 February
Monday 13 February
Monday 27 February
Monday 6 March
Monday 13 March

Materials
Course materials will be published on Brightspace.