“No idea is fully formed until it can be communicated.”  

The Boyer Commission 1998

As we near the end of the academic year, many undergraduate research students and their mentors are planning to present research posters showcasing their accomplishments. In the Infant Development Lab, we—Dr. Thurman and all student researchers—are planning several presentations related to our work on infant motor development. Based on our experiences in this process, we wanted to provide some suggestions to assist with preparing and presenting undergraduate research posters. This blog will focus on advice for students, and our advice for mentors will be shared in a future post. 

For an undergraduate research student, presenting your work is one of the most valuable learning experiences you will have (e.g., Mabrouk 2009). Not only can presenting challenge you to think of your research from the perspective of a viewer, but it will also push you to contribute something unique to your field of research.  

Mixed emotions are normal.  

Upon learning they will have an opportunity to present their research, students might feel a range of emotions. Unlike a class presentation, presenting a research poster often comes as a result of multiple semesters of intensive work with a faculty mentor, which has been scaffolded over time and helps students gain a sense of ownership over their research projects (Shanahan et al. 2015). This can be extremely exciting, and a significant accomplishment to really look forward to, but it can also bring on an overwhelming sense of imposter phenomenon, which is a sense that one is not smart enough, or too unqualified to present (Abramson 2021). Feelings of self-doubt may be more pronounced in students who have historically been alienated or marginalized in academia (Mullings and Mukherjee 2018; Abramson 2021). It can be helpful for a student to reflect on how much they have accomplished since beginning their undergraduate career, compared to where they are now, preparing to present their research findings. 

Indeed, several major shifts occur during research experiences, with the first transition involving a shift from being a student surrounded by other students learning from a single professor in a classroom setting, to being one of few students working in a research lab. This can be intimidating for students to who are used to having more surface-level student-teacher relationships to have this much faculty attention on their work, but it is important to recognize how important and helpful faculty support can be in terms of meeting your goals. Another major shift occurs when students go from seeing themselves as research assistants who complete tasks as they are instructed, to viewing themselves as active collaborators in a process of scientific inquiry (Bowman and Stage 2002). Students often do not have prior experience presenting formal scholarly research and they may feel like they will be unable to remember all the information needed to present their research. For students who have predominately only been working on the logistics of data collection and processing, it might be difficult to imagine how research will end up on an organized and professional-looking poster presentation.  

It might feel daunting to try to plan how to condense everything onto one oversized sheet of paper. A mix of excitement and worried feelings about presentations is normal. Just remember to internalize your successes… you have invested a great deal into your research, and you know it much better than your audience will!  

Ask questions.  

Some students may feel strong pressure to seem self-sufficient (e.g., Thurman and Vandermaas-Peeler 2025), but it is okay to ask for help when you need it. In fact, help-seeking is a mature behavior that indicates you recognize the limits of your current skill level, and the fact that enlisting the help of someone else will allow you to learn more than what you could do if you worked alone.  

Rather than trying to complete what might be an unfamiliar research task on your own, investigate, ask questions, and try to help yourself learn about the process. If you are planning to submit your work to a conference, do some online searches and try to learn more about the organization involved in conference planning, the intended audience, etc. Ask questions to more experienced students or alumnae from your research lab, your research mentor, or other students doing research in your department or university.  You could also review discipline-specific online resources about poster presentations, including any instructions or resources from the meeting at which you plan to present. You may also be able to find some videos recordings of researchers presenting posters, from prior online or remote conferences (Dr. Thurman shared with us a video recording of herself presenting a poster, which she submitted to a professional virtual conference during the pandemic). It could also be helpful to visit your university’s writing center to learn more about the poster planning process.  

Consider what you will gain.  

For some students, major goals in presenting research are to practice relaying information accurately and concisely to general audiences who may not be familiar with your research. Because poster presentations are informal and invite dynamic conversation between the presenters and the audience (unlike verbal presentations, which are more formal and involve unidirectional information transfer), we also look forward to talking about our research accomplishments with a range of scholars who have differing perspectives and ideas about our projects. In addition, presenting your research project differs from typical assignments in college classrooms because it mirrors what actual scientists do in the professional world (Bowman and Stage 2002).  

For academics, posters also provide formative opportunities to get feedback on projects still in progress through interaction with peers (Walkington 2014). Presenters may be asked questions they do not know the answer to, and students may feel nervous about being asked questions they feel unprepared for. Many students are not used to presenting work until it has been finalized, but remaining open to influence and even constructive criticism during your poster presentation can improve your work significantly!  

Try to put a positive spin on the feedback you receive during your presentation—someone cared enough about you and your research to listen to what you had to say and offered support to challenge you to examine your work more deeply.  

Conclusion  

It is so exciting to arrive at the point of the research process when you can share your accomplishments with others. As you prepare your poster with your mentor, reflect on the capability you have shown thus far in your work on your project and keep in mind the network of supportive resources all around you which have led you to this point. View this opportunity as a learning experience which can propel you closer to your goals post-graduation and remember to have fun!  

In our next blog post, we will share advice for mentors on how to support students towards preparing and presenting research posters. It could be helpful for mentees to review this post too, which will help provide some transparency in mentoring practices designed to support your development as a research student.  

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References 

Abramson, Ashley. 2021. “How to Overcome Impostor Phenomenon.” Monitor on Psychology 52 (4): 44-51. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/06/cover-impostor-phenomenon. 

Bowman, Martha Heath, and Frances K. Stage. 2002. “Personalizing the Goals of Undergraduate Research.” Journal of College Science Teaching 32 (2): 120. https://my.nsta.org/resource/?id=10.2505/4/jcst02_032_02_120.  

Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University. 1998. “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities.” State University of New York at Stony Brook for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED424840. 

Mabrouk, Patricia Ann. 2009. “Survey Study Investigating the Significance of Conference Participation to Undergraduate Research Students.” Journal of Chemical Education 86 (11): 1335. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed086p1335. 

Mullings, Beverley, and Sanjukta Mukherjee. 2018. “Reflections on Mentoring as Decolonial, Transnational, Feminist Praxis.” Gender, Place & Culture 25 (10): 1405-1422. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1556614.  

Shanahan, Jenny Olin, Elizabeth Ackley-Holbrook, Eric Hall, Kearsley Stewart, and Helen Walkington. 2015. “Ten Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors: A Review of the Literature.” Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 23 (5): 359-376. https://doi.org/10.1080/13611267.2015.1126162. 

Thurman, Sabrina L., and Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler. Forthcoming. “‘I have allowed myself to be bold’: Reflections on Relational Mentoring in Undergraduate Research.” Perspectives on Undergraduate Research Mentoring 13. 

Walkington, Helen. 2014. “Quality Enhancement of Undergraduate Research—Further Strategies to Increase Student Engagement in Research Dissemination.” Brookes E-journal of Learning and Teaching 6 (1). 

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About the Authors 

Sabrina Thurman is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Elon University and serves as a seminar leader for CEL’s 2023-2025 research seminar on Mentoring Meaningful Learning Experiences. She is an active mentor of undergraduate research in developmental psychology and co-designed a peer mentoring program to support first generation college students at Elon University. She has several publications and presentations on mentoring in higher education and has received awards for teaching excellence. 

Kenan Carter ’25, Kyla Zeldin ’25, Megan Parks ‘25, and Anna Grace Gilbert ’27 are psychology majors and undergraduate student research mentees who work with Dr. Sabrina Thurman in the Infant Development Lab, which is housed within the psychology department at Elon University. 

How to Cite this Post 

Thurman, Sabrina L. 2024. “Collaboration in Creation: A Guide for Preparing and Presenting Research Posters – Part 1, For Students.” Center for Engaged Learning (Blog), Elon University. April 8, 2025. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/collaboration-in-creation-a-guide-for-preparing-and-presenting-research-posters-part-1-for-students.