Protocol and Tips

Convention Protocol

This may be your first convention. To appreciate the experience, here are some guidelines you might find useful.

We will try to maintain the program schedule. If presenters are absent, the session will not move other presenters forward in the timetable. This way, you are assured that you get to hear what you were expecting to hear.
Enter and exit in-progress sessions quietly and inconspicuously. Presenters should attend the entire session in which they are presenting.
When you are in an area where a session is not occurring, other sessions may be going on nearby. Please keep the noise level down, even in the hallways.
Perhaps it is a good idea to attend papers and view posters from universities and colleges other than your own. While it is a good thing to cheer on your classmates, there might be an opportunity to expand your own knowledge base.
Always respect others’ opinions. Questions can challenge, but should not confront or demean. Constructive criticism is good, but remember what Aunt Ruth said about common courtesy and good manners.
Mingle. It is always difficult to introduce yourself to “strangers,” but all of the participants are interested in Psychology and have a lot in common. This is an opportunity to grow in your chosen field by discussing topics of interest, making contacts with persons at other institutions, complaining about your stat professor, etc.

Tips for Presenters

1. Practice. Practice in front of a live or nearly-live audience. Ask your friends, ask the Psychology faculty, ask the members of Psi Chi, and anyone else to attend a mock paper session. At this session, you should practice: (a) keeping it within the time constraints (12 minutes max for the Great Plains Convention,) (b) good public speaking principles (e.g., speaking slowly, clearly, and with sufficient volume,) (c) answering questions (Challenge your friends to stump you. Don’t worry, the faculty don’t have to be encouraged to ask tough questions.) Have someone time your presentation. Have the audience give you honest feedback concerning your presentation. Take the feedback, improve your talk, and practice again. The Room C in the Nebraskan has been reserved for practice sessions.

2. Don’t read, talk. Using a prepared outline or note cards is the best approach. Number the note cards in case you trip before the presentation. Stay on track by referring to the outline. Hit the important points and let the details slide unless it is an important detail or if someone asks a question. Talk to the audience as if they were undergraduate psychology majors. Guess what? At Great Plains, they will be.

3. If you must read, write the paper for listeners not readers. If you are too nervous or too compulsive to give a presentation from an outline, prepare a written text that you will read. However, be kind to the audience. They are listening to the paper, not reading it. Oral communication cannot contain a lot of information because the listener is quickly overloaded. It is OK to be repetitive, especially to repeat the important points. It is important to supplement your presentation with visual aids, because this reduces the amount of information to be processed. It is important to look at the audience to make sure you haven’t lost them. Blank looks or snoring is evidence that you’ve lost them. Remember that an oral presentation cannot be a comprehensive review of previous research, of your data, of your wonderful department, or of yourself, because the listeners cannot keep up, don’t consider it germane, or just don’t care. So don’t try to read long lists of citations, long lists of statistics, or long descriptions of methodological details. Make your point and sit down.

4. Nerves. Everyone is nervous at these sessions, so you’re not alone. Practice helps reduce your anxiety levels. Realize that in a room of 30 listeners, only a handful will consider asking questions, and perhaps one question in a session of 5 or 6 papers will be a toughie. The students who should really worry about questions are graduate students.

Tips for Posters

1. Format. The area for your poster is 42" wide x 3' tall. Have your poster prepared and laid out before the convention so that you can catch errors while you can correct them. A good rule of thumb is that a person should be able to read the poster from a distance of 2 yards. In general, typewriter-sized print is not large enough. The convention will supply thumb tacks, tape, and other stuff, but it’s a good idea to bring your own. Lay out your poster and have friends and/or faculty review it for readability, clarity of message, and attractiveness. The message can somewhat more complicated than an oral presentation but it still should be to the point. In general, important points are in larger type and are more centrally located than unimportant points. The poster does not have to be a comprehensive description of your study.

2. Handouts. It is highly recommended that you have a handout that summarizes your poster. Some presenters’ handout is a full-fledged APA-style paper, others have a supplementary non-APA style handout that gives a bit more detail than the poster, and others summarize the information on the poster in a smaller format. Be sure to include your name and address on any handout in case someone wants to call you about your research. If you run out of handouts, take names and offer to mail them a copy of the handout.

3. The session itself. The purpose of a poster session is to encourage one-on-one discussions of your work. You should hang around your poster with your name tag clearly visible. There may be some people who want to ask you about your poster. This is a good opportunity to meet people who share your interests.