*Advice on the Project Board comes from Kim Scott's experiences at the 2006 Intel Science Talent Search. Nonetheless, the suggestions given here are relevent for most, if not all, research projects.

Some more technical points about the project board:

> Make a logical decision about what software to use to create poster materials. The learning curve is something to consider, but the complexity of the plan is too. My strategy was to create figures in xfig, although most of them required me to use latex code to generate math stuff, which was compiled into dvi or pdf files and inserted in the figures by "grabbing" small screenshots in xv. The final output for the figures was a sequence of pdf files. I wrote the normal text in latex and made pdf files for that, too. Then--and here is the clever part--I took screenshots of the pdf files and inserted them into PowerPoint, where they joined the section headings, title, and background already there. Of course, this means that some of my poster went through five format changes. This is a really bad idea, and makes revision--even minor revision--difficult. (Oh! That should be F1, not F2! Well, I'll just change that in the LaTeX file, compile it again, get a screenshot, reinsert it and line everything up again! No problem!) The logic was that I really needed pretty math notation, but in the interest of font continuity didn't want to just do math-involving stuff in LaTeX. If you have a math project, I don't know what you should do, but this isn't it. If you are lucky enough to have a project with only a few funny symbols, you have more logical options available.

> Make sure it's possible to make a PDF of your poster that looks decent, so that you don't have to worry about whether printing will actually work.

> Leave at least three or four days for printing, even if you are convinced you've got everything all set up.

> Check out printing costs ahead of time if you want to print sizable chunks of your poster and/or project board on large, pretty paper. Kinko's charges $7 per square foot for color and $.75 per square foot for black and white; if you really only need color for a few figures and the background, consider printing in black and white and doing some cut-and-pasting.

> Think early about how you'll transport your project.

>> Go back for other advice on Project Boards for science research.