yeah it's the same thing. a machine-controlled die vinyl cutter is best and most sign shops have them and can do custom one off jobs for a reasonable price.

of course, vinyl is one-use and it gets silly expensive for what you're getting, especially if the sign shop thinks their time is super-seriously valuable. if your school can do it, do it there. you'll need a vector design (cad, illustrator, cnc) file of your design.

if you just have a raster image, like a picture, it will take some doing and that's when it gets expensive.

if you just have text it should be easy, because text is vector as long as you have the font. typography can be complicated but for most intents and purposes it should be simple.