Poster competition develops valuable skills
Summarising a 20,000 word-plus thesis into a few hundred words and ensuring visual impact as well is no easy task, as winner of the CRESA-sponsored postgraduate poster competition, Sarah Gerritsen, is the first to acknowledge.
An MA student at Victoria University of Wellington, Sarah won first prize of $1,500. Elena Stevens and Kirsten Keown, also Victoria University students, won second and third prizes respectively, each worth $750.
Sarah’s poster was based on her thesis for an MA (Applied) Social Science Research degree at Victoria University. The research is entitled “Children, food and poverty: Food insecurity among primary school students in the Wellington region” and is due February 2005. The project quantifies the number of hungry children in the region, records and compares the responses of schools to this issue and gathers principals’ opinions on the link between poverty and food insecurity.
Sarah said the results of her research show that there is a small but significant number of children in the region who were estimated to be regularly hungry, and that food insecurity was strongly correlated with socio-economic status (measured using the school decile rating). Ten per cent of children in Decile 1 and 2 schools were estimated by their principals to be regularly hungry during the school day.
Sarah said the poster competition, held in conjunction with the SPRE conference, was a fantastic opportunity to share her research findings with policy makers and other researchers. “I feel very privileged to have won with such tough competition! It was very difficult to reduce the project down to the salient points and in that regard it was great experience for the real world where the ability to condense complex ideas is crucial to getting heard,” she said.
“Thank you to CRESA for the generous prize. I recommend all postgraduates enter the competition next time as it is a great opportunity to get your work out there.”
Elena’s poster looked at problems in the psychological adaptation among Russian immigrants to New Zealand. She finished a BSc (Hons) in Psychology this year and plans to enrol in a PhD in Psychology next year. Kirsten has also just completed her BSc(Hons) in Psychology. Her poster summarised her research investigating child molesters’ offence-supportive beliefs.
For more information on Sarah’s thesis, go to www.hungrykids.info
