St John's Poster Competition 2025

Competition Entry Requirements:

St John's is delighted to be launching our Poster Competition for 2025. The competition is open to all UK-based prospective applicants: UK-based students in Year 12 (England/Wales) / S5 (Scotland) / Y13 (Northern Ireland) or UK-based students who will be submitting their undergraduate applications by the 15th October 2025 UCAS deadline.

You need to undertake a research project on an academic topic or question that interests you (from any subject area and which relates to the competition theme) and create an academic research poster about it. The theme of this year's competition is ‘Imitation’. Your submission must relate to this theme and we encourage creative interpretations of the theme.

Each submitted entry must be produced by an individual student and cannot be the result of group project work. Each student can only submit one entry.

Each submitted entry should include the following:

1. An academic research poster, containing academic references
2. A separate bibliography

It is recommended to format the poster on 1 slide in PowerPoint. Please edit the slide’s size in the Design tab, clicking on Slide Size, then Custom Slide Size: it is recommended to select A3, ensuring that width and height measurements are 26.67cm and 35.56cm. Your poster can be landscape or portrait orientation. Please ensure that any images or figures included on your poster are cited if they are taken from other sources, and have brief explanatory captions. Once you have finished your poster in PowerPoint, export/save the file as a PDF before submitting.

The bibliography should also be submitted as a PDF.

You need to submit your entry (poster and bibliography) by 4pm on Monday 4th August 2025. Please click here for the online form to submit your poster and bibliography.

Each submission will be judged by academics at St John's College researching/teaching in your submission's academic area(s). All entrants will receive individual feedback about their submission in September 2025 and there will be prizes in the form of National Book Tokens for the best submissions.

Guidance and Support for Competition Entrants:

For advice and guidance on academic referencing and producing a bibliography, please click here.

We will be running optional drop-in sessions in July for poster competition entrants to ask questions and seek guidance with their projects. Please sign up to one of these Zoom sessions via this form.

For examples of previous years' winning submissions, as well as resources and videos to help you get started with your research poster, please see below.

Please get in touch with AccessOfficer@joh.cam.ac.uk if you have any questions about the competition or any issues when submitting your entry.

Helpful links and resources

Super-curricular resource hubs from Cambridge and Oxford:

University of Cambridge Super-curricular Suggestions

Super-curricular Resource Hub from University College, Oxford

Useful guidance on creating and formatting academic research posters from Newcastle University

Advice and guidance on academic research skills e.g. referencing, effective academic reading and note-making:

CamGuides for Undergraduates

Open Access research from Cambridge University:

Cambridge Digital Library – a database of digitised research and material from Cambridge

Cambridge University Research – latest news

Apollo - University of Cambridge Open Access Repository

Open access journals and search engines

Bio Med Central - open access journals in biomedicine, physical sciences, mathematics and engineering

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - open access, peer-reviewed journals in all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and humanities

JSTOR - an open access platform for scholarship, primary sources, and research collections

NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Science - an open access journal covering the relevant physical, chemical and biological components of atmospheric and climate science

Open Library of the Humanities - an open access platform supporting academic journals from across the humanities subjects

Open Book Publishers - open access e-books

Additional Poster Preparation Advice (from The Challenger Society for Marine Science)

• A poster needs to be attractive, and draw attention to itself.

• A poster needs to be easily readable, and not just by someone standing really close to it. For the main text, take care to choose a clear type-face at sensible point size. Avoid long complex sentences.

• Avoid large slabs of text and overlong line-lengths; the optimal line-length for readability is considered to be 50–65 characters per line, including spaces. For consistent spacing between words, use unjustified text.

• Ensure your diagrams are large enough to be seen clearly, and that the line weights of graphs etc. aren’t too spindly.

• Ensure that you have explained your symbols and acronyms, and have put scales on figures if necessary.

• Aim to have no more than about five figures (diagrams and photos). Remember that a well-chosen image/visual can be worth a thousand words.

• Diagrams need to be close to the text that relates to them, or very easily located, and they should be accompanied by captions.

• Make use of colour to enliven the poster and help direct the reader where to look.

• Don’t be tempted into over-complicating the appearance of the poster, and obscuring your message.

• Try to convey why your research and your project is so exciting.