A weekly reflection on life in academia
Today was my first Poster Day at the School of Public Health. For those readers not intimately attuned to the School’s calendar (i.e. most of you), it’s a chance for second year Masters students to present and talk about their Summer field experiences (something all students are required to do). As a result, I spent an enlightening couple of hours browsing through over 150 posters from three departments in the school, talking to students about their summer placements, fellowships and internships, and helping evaluate the posters.
This was a really energizing event. The posters ranged from super-professional looking PowerPoint creations to artistic hand-built montages of text and graphics, and covered everything from social epidemiology research to occupational hygiene work experience. Interestingly, the hand-built displays often conveyed more than the PowerPoint builds – although I’m sure that was nothing to do with PowerPoint stifling creativity! The constant here though was the enthusiasm and articulation of the students in talking about what they did and what they gained from it.
In fact, while it is the quality of the posters that is evaluated in this event, I left really wishing the one-one presentations that accompanied them were also part of the evaluation process. This is where you got the best sense of how students are beginning to make sense of their training under real-world situations – and reveling in it.
All in all, an enjoyable afternoon.
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Kinda sad that you can see such a useful metric of student progress and most likely it is swept under the carpet unnecessarily… curmudgeony academic bureaucracy…