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Preparing higher education students for careers in the sciences often involves providing training to effectively present their research findings verbally and visually. Symposiums, poster competitions, and similar events are a common forum to give students opportunities to present their ideas and work while being evaluated by faculty. While great for students and faculty, managing these large-scale events can be challenging for administrative teams.
That’s why many institutions rely on InfoReady’s powerful software platform to help run their symposiums, poster competitions and more.
InfoReady can manage all the administrative work of collecting interest and applications, reviewing and scoring submissions, gathering materials for printing or posting, exporting data for reports and tracking it all.
Here’s how InfoReady has helped a few institutions.
Launching a Cross-Institutional Research Symposium at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC)
Leaders of the Health Sciences Center (HSC) and Texas Tech University (TTU) wanted to pilot a joint research day on the Amarillo campus for students, trainees, and faculty. The event would bring together researchers from the TTUHSC Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Health Professions and Pharmacy with the TTU School of Veterinary Medicine. All students and trainees were invited to participate. “The goal was to create one research-centered event for the Amarillo campus rather than having each school conduct its own”, said Audrey DeLeon, Program Director.
It was decided that this symposium would be a day-long event with both poster and oral presentations. “The big need we identified for InfoReady would be to collect a high volume of abstracts to be reviewed within one week by faculty in a centralized location,” said Audrey. “Behind the scenes, the administrative committee needed to compile the data that was collected from these submissions in InfoReady. InfoReady was also a great way to communicate with a large group of participants at once.”
“Our event success was achieved with InfoReady because this is how we selected our participants,” Audrey shared. “On the day of, we had 113 presenters, and over 300 attendees to the actual event.”
Read more of the story, Launching a Cross Institutional Research Symposium.
Running a Large Undergraduate Research Symposium at University of California, Irvine Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UCI UROP)
UCI UROP has been hosting an annual symposium where undergraduate researchers present their work and findings for 30 years. The most recent event was very large, with over 700 individual student projects involving 1,000 individual students with roughly 2,000 people attending the event.
The whole process of registering students for presentations, reviewing submissions, assigning all times and locations is a very complicated, very detailed process to manage.
Sharon Parks, UROP Director explained how they manage with InfoReady: “We started using InfoReady for students to submit proposals to receive recognition and funding for their research. We would send out an email to all of campus inviting any undergraduates doing research to register to present by a deadline. InfoReady was used to find out ‘Who wants to come? Who wants to present? Do they want to do a poster presentation? We did have an option for an oral presentation to be judged. What would you like to do?’ Later in the process, we send out a progress report for the students to fine tune their proposal and to have them submit their assets.”
“When we learned about InfoReady’s Engagement Hub, we added that functionality to use with our symposium,” continued Sharon. “The students upload their digital assets-- their photos, their abstracts themselves. Then to be able to display all of the abstracts and profile pictures of all the students doing the projects and then their digital poster and their videos of their presentations, really allowed us to put the icing on the cake.
We could still have the symposium without Engagement Hub, but to have all of that added content, that we've never had before, has been great for promoting the event and for students to be able to show their parents and their friends and put on their CVs or resumes. It really value added to the symposium by giving us a real online presence.”
Read more of the story of UC Irvine's use of InfoReady for undergraduate research.
Increasing Efficiency at Oklahoma State University
The OSU Undergraduate Research Symposium is a full-day campus-wide activity open to all undergraduate students, regardless of discipline and what phase of the research process. Students are offered the choice of three presentation formats -- poster, flash talk, or videotaped presentations of performing and visual arts.
Dr. Christine Johnson, Associate Vice President, Vice President for Research’s Office explained how InfoReady helped her team run a very successful event.
“Thanks to our efforts in getting the word out plus the ease of using InfoReady, we had a remarkable 203 percent increase in applications.”
“What I really want to focus on, though, is efficiency,” continued Dr. Johnson, “because this is where I was amazed at how we utilized InfoReady and what it could do. I came into work around 8:30 in the morning and by 10:30, only two hours later, I had exported the data into Excel, organized it and the Symposium program was set and ready for exporting the data into Excel. “
“Hopefully the message is clear that… we definitely increased efficiency and saved time and resources. Not only was the ease of grouping and creating our schedule of sessions very easy, but we’ve also eliminated errors, have not had any misplaced or lost applications, and no missing components. That’s remarkable in itself, since we’ve increased applications in both of these activities and doubled the number of reviewers.
Overall, I don’t know how we would have been able to manage all of the necessary parts without using a tool like InfoReady.”
Read more of how Oklahoma State University manages scholarships and symposiums with the help of InfoReady
Other institutions save time and resources as they grow their poster competitions with the help of InfoReady.
How does a university foster community engagement through its research activity, while simultaneously focusing on student learning outcomes? For Arkansas State University, these goals are accomplished through their premier program, Create @ State. a year-long initiative that pairs students with faculty mentors to engage in research and creative activity, culminating in a 2-day symposium of poster presentations and performances.
“You need one site for communication and opportunity searches...whether it is to submit to competitions or register for events that you manage,” said Emily Devereaux, former Executive Director of Research and Technology Transfer at Arkansas State University.
Read tips for an effective poster competition from Arkansas State University.
“Our annual poster competition used to be a logistical nightmare, requiring the time and resources of numerous committee members and my one-person office. Now, with InfoReady, we’re able to collect entries through a standardized submission process, offer online judging, and automatically report on participation details. Judges love it, submissions are of a higher quality, and we’re saving significant resources – I am able to manage the poster submission and review process entirely on my own." Leslie Paige, MS, EdS, Director, Office of Scholarship and Sponsored Project, Fort Hays State University
Read more about how Fort Hays State University improved their poster competitions.
The functionality in InfoReady helps institutions with everything from soliciting applications to reporting outcomes, assessment, student self-assessment, and even communication. Doing more with less is a requirement for all colleges and universities today. InfoReady’s all-in-one software platform is ready to help.
