TYDE supports researchers at every stage of their career. In October, nine teams of students got the opportunity to share their research with the 175 people who attended Youth-Nex at UVA’s Alumni Hall during a lunch time poster session.
The posters were peppered throughout the large hall and exhibited a wide array of work, including topics related to factors affecting digital anxiety interventions, Spanish-speaking individuals with anxiety, youth emotional awareness, and a study on willingness to talk to strangers.
Poster sharing is an effective way for students to receive both constructive feedback and positive encouragement on projects that have occupied a large percentage of their time and concentration.
“The session was a great opportunity to learn and engage with a larger audience on the issues of adolescent social media usage and its impact on social skills, emotion regulation, and overall mental wellbeing,” said co-presenter Katelyn Birchfield, M.Ed., who presented on Coping Power-Rural, a tool intended for teachers and caregivers to assist with youth emotion and behavioral regulation.
Birchfield’s team, like many others, is prepping for another upcoming conference and values the conference’s critiques. She noted it’s “a great environment to gain additional presentation skills and practice responding to a live audience.”
The professional diversity of attendees also provided presenters with alternative perspectives on their research. Kaitlyn Petz, Project Coordinator of the Program for Anxiety and Cognitive Treatment (PACT) Lab, was motivated by the variability of questions, “I’ve presented posters at a few different primarily psychology-based conferences before, and I found that the audience asked really exciting questions that I hadn’t considered before because of the interdisciplinary nature of the crowd. It was so invigorating to hear thoughts and it made me look at a project that I’ve worked on for multiple years in a completely new way.”
Presenter Kyle Barrentine echoed these sentiments, when he discussed his study on willingness to talk to strangers, “This session was the most traffic I’ve ever received for a poster. The audience was particularly engaging and fun to talk with.”
Thank you to the entire slew of presenters, contributors, and faculty mentors for your participation: Laura Barnes, Kyle Barrentine, Katelyn Birchfield, Mehdi Boukhechba, Catherine Bradshaw, Emilu Englander-Fuentes, Valentina Mendoza Gonzalez, Cheyenne Harris-Starling, Marian Herboso, Kirsten M.P. McKone, Audrey Michel, Maddie Mixon, Taylor L. Myers, Courtney Newman, Kaleigh O’Hara, Paloma Perez, Kaitlyn Petz, Varun Reddy, Mark Rucker, Stefanie Sequeira, Candra Skrzypek, Bethany Teachman, Sarah Tolman, Emma Toner, Zhiyuan Wang, Alexandra Werntz, Emma Wolfe, Adrienne Wood, and Yiyang Zhang.
