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Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards

OSPP Coordinator: Lena Noack (ospp@egu.eu)

In relation with its General Assemblies, the Union presents a number of special awards, such as the Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards to further improve the overall quality of poster and PICO presentations and most importantly, to foster the excitement of younger colleagues in presenting their work in the form of a poster or a PICO (Presenting Interactive COntent). The OSPP awards are presented at the level of the EGU Programme Groups.

Recipients

Nomination Procedure

Criteria for application

Eligible for the Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Awards are students who:

  1. are first author and personally present the poster or PICO at the conference;
  2. satisfy one of the following criteria:
    • are a current undergraduate (e.g., BSc) or postgraduate (e.g., MSc, PhD) student;
    • are a recent undergraduate or postgraduate student (conferral of degree after 1 January of the year preceding the conference) who are presenting their thesis work.

Please note that each first author can register only one abstract (poster or PICO) for the OSPP contest at the General Assembly.

Procedure of application

Authors may express their interest in participating in the OSPP contest when submitting their abstract. With the letter of schedule, authors are informed about the final form of their presentation: oral, poster or PICO. In case of poster or PICO, students fulfilling the above criteria can register for OSPP by selecting the respective link in the letter of schedule. In case of more than one poster and/or PICO presentation as a first author, students are asked to decide which presentation should participate in the OSPP contest. The student names are then forwarded to the OSPP coordinators of the respective programme group. Authors receive a confirmation email after the OSPP registration deadline (which is about two weeks after the letter of schedule).

Procedure of selection

If you participate in OSPP, please attach the OSPP label (blue SVG, blue PNG, yellow SVG, yellow PNG) to your poster board. Alternatively, you might include the label in the poster itself. If you participate with a PICO, you are kindly asked to add the OSPP label to your PICO presentation header.

The OSPP coordinator of each programme group sends out emails to all (co-)conveners with the list of OSPP abstracts to be judged in their session and asking them to nominate three judges for each presentation before the meeting. The (co-)conveners obtain prior consent from the judges and may choose to do part of the judging themselves. To avoid conflicts of interest, judges should not be involved in the work or supervision of the student. The OSPP coordinator checks before the meeting that enough judges have been assigned to each participating poster or PICO presentation and may nominate additional judges if necessary.

Evaluation forms for each OSPP presentation will then be made available to all judges via a personal link to the OSPP online system. These forms include a number of criteria to be evaluated by the judges. Criteria include the scientific quality of the presentation, the design, and the student’s ability to answer questions, with marks given from 0 to 10.

The judges evaluate the presentations at the General Assembly during the poster session or the PICO viewing time, respectively. Note, that the two-minute presentation of PICOs is not part of the award evaluation. Each judge is expected to speak to the student during the poster/PICO session because this guarantees some extra attendance for the student, and because the student’s ability to describe and defend their work is part of the OSPP evaluation criteria. The judges are asked to work confidentially. The judges then fill in the evaluation forms online.

After the General Assembly, the OSPP programme group coordinator proposes a ranking among all the participating posters and PICOs (one combined list) in the programme group based on average marks that are automatically compiled from all evaluation forms. The top presentations of this ranking will get the award. The number of awards in each programme group should depend on the quality and the number of participating presentations in that year. In general, the number of awards should be small to keep the contest competitive and the award a special distinction. The programme group chair / division president ultimately decides on the awards based on the ranking, no later than two months after the General Assembly.

Award presentation

Each awardee is notified by the EGU OSPP coordinator. Awardees are asked to submit a short statement on affiliation and research interests (two to three sentences), a portrait photo and their PICO presentation or a PDF of their poster to the EGU Executive Office. The information is published on the EGU OSPP award website. The awardees receive a conference fee waiver for the next EGU General Assembly and are invited to submit a paper (where the awardee is first author) free of publication costs to one of the EGU journals. At the respective division meeting held at the next General Assembly, each awardee receives an award certificate.