This is a poster that I made for the 2011 annual review of my research grant. This review was significant because it was at the end of the original 4-year span of the grant. Afterward, our grant was extended another 4 years. The external review board had commented the previous year that one of their favorite aspects of the review was the student poster session. So, in 2011, they asked us to do posters again.
I’m very proud of this poster for some technical and some non-technical reasons. I think it shows my interest in the entire subject of presentation of results, and I’m happy with the design qualities that went into it. I’m also happy that I didn’t do the simplest and easiest thing, which would have been just to finish as fast as possible, using the templates we were given.
There was a risk that the extra time I spent on this poster would be wasted. I can’t say this universally, of course, but I think it’s basically universal that poster sessions are the height of boring. And conferences and review meetings, which are the most popular venues for poster sessions, are maybe the width of it. The boring area is pretty huge for this type of thing, and I just couldn’t handle that.
I admit, this was partially pride. There’s more beyond that, though, if you’ll allow me to take the long way around for a moment–I need to tell a story to illustrate this point. I have a very vivid memory of wanting to get better at graphite (pencil) drawing sometime when I was in high school. I pulled down a book about Leonardo DaVinci and decided to copy one of his drawings in order to learn about portraying light and shadow in a monochrome. My method was simple: I would copy the image exactly, until my paper looked like the book. After about an hour, I had completed probably a two-inch by two-inch section, so I went to ask for some criticism from my dad (an artist).
He said, “the part you did looks fine, but keep in mind, you’re drawing a picture. And the picture is the whole image, it’s not just that one little part. It’s better to make sure that the whole thing comes along to the same degree of done-ness, because then you have a complete picture.”
He probably doesn’t even remember this (I should ask him…), but I do because it describes a whole philosophy. It’s not the “weakest link in the chain” philosophy, although they sound kind of the same. It’s not that a picture is only as good as the weakest part of the picture, it’s really that a picture is something you look at all at once. A great example of this is Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”. You have to look at this painting all at once if you want to see what it means. Although it’s really fun to stand super close to it and look at all the tiny dots and brushstrokes that make up the painting, that doesn’t really explain the painting; it’s just interesting. I think this is true of anything, not just art.
So, to get back to the poster session, you could say I thought of it as being part of my overall participation in the project. If it were a “weakest link” scenario and my weakest link was bad poster I’d made, then maybe that would have hurt me. In reality, though, it’s not very likely that anyone would have cared. I looked at this more as an opportunity to be holistic and concentrate on the overall project, which meant that I had to consider my poster to be a part of the results it is intended to represent and explain. A painting is not the sum of its parts, but instead a whole which depends on each part to be complete. Research, also, is not really just the results obtained thereby, or the mathematical equations written in order to solve a problem.
Research, instead, comprises many parts which only make sense in conjunction. First of all, research isn’t really important unless somebody cares about the outcome. Otherwise it’s like riding backward on a unicycle while playing the violin—really hard, but so what? Second, and many consider this to be a sad truth, even if somebody cares about it, most people don’t, even if they should. There is a “sales” aspect to science and teaching. If you don’t believe me, you can see what Richard Hamming had to say about it, and Seth Godin will tell you how to do it.
A simple poster is no less important than all figures and equations placed upon it, and the figures and equations aren’t really any less important than the words explaining a mathematical derivation or the derivation itself, because these things only make sense when they work together.