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Poster Template — August 12 Symposium

Your required deliverable for ASSIP 2026 is a research poster, defended in person (and via virtual breakout for remote interns) at the ASSIP Research Symposium on Wednesday, August 12, 2026. This page tells you exactly what the poster needs to look like and how to build it. The substantive guidance — what counts as a finding worth posting, how to talk to a stranger about your work in three minutes — lives in Chapter 8.5 of the textbook.

Physical format

Spec Value
Dimensions 48 inches wide × 36 inches tall (landscape, horizontal orientation)
File format PDF, with all fonts embedded
Color space CMYK preferred (some printers will accept sRGB; CMYK avoids surprises)
Resolution All raster figures at ≥ 300 DPI at final print size
Template GMU College of Science official poster template (URL TBD — to confirm with Dr. Haymond Still)
Bleed None (the GMU template includes a built-in border)
File naming poster_<lastname>_<projectN>_v<NN>.pdf, e.g., poster_doe_p07_v03.pdf

Template URL not yet finalized

The GMU College of Science poster template URL for ASSIP 2026 will be circulated by the program office before Week 6. Email cosassip@gmu.edu to confirm. Until that link lands, you can prototype against the generic Mason template at https://branding.gmu.edu.

Sections (in order, left → right, top → bottom)

A reader walking past your poster spends an average of eight seconds before deciding whether to stop. The structure below is the one Prof. Gao uses with his own coauthors; it works because every section answers the next question a skeptical reader is going to ask.

1. Title and authorship (top banner)

  • Title: ≤ 15 words. Active voice. Names the headline finding or question.
  • Author line: Your name · ASSIP 2026 · George Mason University, College of Science.
  • Mentor line: Mentor: Prof. Lei Gao, Costello College of Business.
  • Track tag: small badge in the corner — Fair Lending / Common Ownership / Innovation / FinTech / Macro Events.

2. Question (top-left, ~10% of the poster)

One sentence. Why does anyone care?

3. Data (top-middle, ~10%)

Two or three lines. Source, time window, unit of observation, N. One figure if you can — a map, a time-series count of observations, or a small balance table.

4. Design (top-right, ~15%)

The empirical specification, written out as an equation, with every variable defined. The PAP link (pap/pap-v1.md) and the file-date timestamp. The decision rule — what does the headline coefficient sign and significance buy you?

5. Results (center, ~30%, the largest single block)

One headline figure or table — the one a reader would walk away remembering. Then one supporting table or figure. Captions must be self-contained: a reader who reads only the caption should understand what the picture is saying.

6. Robustness (bottom-center, ~15%)

Three to five robustness checks, each a one-line label plus a small coefficient plot or table. The point is to show the reader that you tried to break your result and it survived.

7. Contribution (bottom-right, ~10%)

Two or three bullets. What did we know before? What do we know now? Why is the difference worth your reader's time?

  • QR code → GitHub repo (mandatory).
  • QR code → PAP (mandatory).
  • Funding / acknowledgments (ASSIP, College of Science, RA sub-leader).
  • A reproducibility statement: "All figures and tables in this poster reproduce from a single make all command on commit <sha>."

Typography

Element Font Size at final print Notes
Title Sans, bold 80 – 100 pt Readable from 10 feet away
Section headers Sans, bold 36 – 44 pt Same color for all sections
Body text Sans, regular 24 – 28 pt This is the minimum readable size at a poster session
Figure captions Sans, italic 20 – 22 pt One short paragraph; never two
Equations Serif (LaTeX-style) or Computer Modern 24 – 30 pt Render at vector resolution
URLs / footer Mono 18 – 20 pt OK to use the smaller size in the footer only

The Mason brand fonts (Source Sans 3 for body, Roboto Slab for display) are the defaults in the GMU template. Do not change them.

Figure standards

Every figure on your poster must conform to the Appendix D — Figure Standards in the textbook. The short version:

  • One message per figure. If you find yourself writing "and also" in the caption, split it into two figures.
  • Axes labeled with units (Coefficient (pp), not coef).
  • Confidence intervals shown explicitly — error bars, shaded ribbons, or whiskers. Never report point estimates without a measure of uncertainty.
  • Color-blind safe palette. The textbook ships with a Mason-green-anchored palette in code/fig_style.py / code/fig_style.R — use it.
  • Source line in the bottom-right of every figure: Source: <data> · Sample: <window> · N = <n>.
  • Reproducible — the figure must be produced from a script in your repo, not from a hand-edited Illustrator file. The script's filename goes in the figure's metadata so we can find it months later.

Synthetic-results notice (only if applicable)

Some projects will run their final specification on real data; others may, for reasons of data availability or licensing, finish the summer with results on a synthetic or placebo sample. That is not a failure — Chapter 7 explains why a synthetic-data pipeline is itself a research contribution — but it must be disclosed prominently on the poster.

If any figure or table on your poster uses synthetic, simulated, or placebo data:

Required notice — place a visible badge in the figure title block

Results based on synthetic data — interpretation is illustrative, not inferential.

The badge should be at least 22 pt, red or Mason-gold background, and placed inside the Results section header. The same notice must appear at the top of your JSSR abstract.

If only a subset of figures uses synthetic data, label those figures individually and leave the rest unmarked. Your PAP must already note which variables would be synthesized; the disclosure on the poster mirrors that.

Build pipeline

The recommended workflow:

  1. Draft the poster in a .qmd or .tex file inside poster/ in your repo.
  2. Compile to PDF with make poster.
  3. Open a draft PR titled Poster v1 — [Project N] — [Your Name] by Friday August 7, 2026.
  4. Address PR comments by Monday August 10, 2026 (dress rehearsal).
  5. Submit the final PDF to the College of Science poster-printing queue per the deadline that the program office circulates (typically Mon Aug 10 of symposium week).

The dress rehearsal on Aug 10 is the last point at which mentors and pod RA sub-leaders can flag a layout problem before the print run goes out.

What graders look for

When Prof. Gao and the visiting faculty walk the symposium floor on August 12, they are scoring on four axes:

  1. Clarity of the question. Can a stranger read the top-left corner and immediately know what you were trying to answer?
  2. Honesty of the result. Is the PAP linked? Are the robustness checks visible? Is the uncertainty quantified?
  3. Quality of the visualization. Does the headline figure stand on its own? Are the colors and labels legible at three feet?
  4. The three-minute pitch. Can you defend your numbers to a skeptical reader in 180 seconds without notes? See Ch 8.5 for the pitch structure.

A great poster is one that — even with the author missing for ten minutes during the symposium — still teaches a stranger something true about the world.