Goal 3.2 is the ability for students to be able to effectively communicate orally in multiple contexts within the discipline. Almost every biology class at Longwood University requires its students to create and present posters of a major experiment of the semester. I have presented posters for classes dealing with molecular biology, genetics, ecology, and evolution. I have decided to put up two artifacts of two important posters I have created.
The first artifact was the first poster I ever created about the microbial diversity of two water systems in Prince Edward County. Since it was the first one, I can see a lot of mistakes that I made on it. The poster is way too wordy and looks clutter. I should have made the results figure all the same size and run statistics on the line graph to look for significance. I remembered presenting it to my classmates and being very nervous since I had not done a poster presentation before. The thing I struggled with the most was reading directly off my poster.
The second artifact was from my junior year when I presented at the Virginia Academy of Science. At that time, I had presented at a couple of posters before so I was a little more confident. My poster was neat, had good figure legends, a nice color scheme, and statistics. I was more confident and did not read directly off the poster too much when I was talking to people. Overall, my presentation skills have improved since freshman year but there is still more I need to work on which include talking more slowly and remaining calm and confident when presenting.