If you’re nervous about an upcoming poster session it may help to articulate your specific concerns, develop a strategy to address each one, and then proceed to have a great poster session. Here are some common concerns and my suggested strategies. Concerns about presenting unpublished or unfinished work Fear 1: The project is unfinished so people will ask questions I can’t answer. You are presenting work that isn’t yet published so there will be gaps in your research.

Presenting your research at a poster session is a learned skilled. If you find it hard the first time don’t panic, you just need some practice and a little help. I used to get a stomach ache just thinking about presenting at a poster session. Now I look forward to them and leave more energized about my research. Here are the steps I took to improve my poster session experience.

I’ve written an open R software package to perform bacterial genome-wide association studies. Read the wiki to learn about it, download the package (instructions here), and take it for a spin!

It’s called hogwash. hoGWASh. Get it?! Tough crowd.

The Venture Capital Competition for Graduate Students The Venture Capital Investment Competition is the “world’s largest venture capital competition with over 70 universities competing. VCIC is the only place where students get to be VCs for the day” Although I’m sure student funds, such as the Dorm Room Fund and Contrary Capital, would argue that students can be investors while still in school. In the competition each university team hears pitches from three businesses and drafts a term sheet for the most promising venture.

Healthcare fortunes at stake during conference The J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference (JPMHC) is an annual get together of pharma and biotech bigwigs in San Francisco. It’s considered common knowledge that stocks change in response to the speeches, deals, and data presented at the meeting. One article said that: “Biotech has historically outperformed the broader market during The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference” and “in the past 16 years, the NYSE Arca Biotechnology index (BTK), which measures the performance of 30 biotechnology firms, has outperformed the S&P 500 index by nearly 3 percent during JPMorgan’s conference.