I represented QUT Business School in the Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT®) in my second year of my PhD, just as the COVID-19 epidemic started to unfold in Australia. The aim of the 3MT is to communicate your doctoral research to an intelligent but non-specialist audience in three minutes, in an impactful, engaging and exciting way.
Expectations vs reality
I thought I’d find myself relatively within my comfort zone with the 3MT. I’d had plenty of prior experience of public speaking: I was a high school debater, an enthusiastic Toastmaster, and had delivered talks and classes at numerous conferences and universities. Little did I realise what was in store!
While I think these experiences may have helped me in the early stages of preparing my speech, I quickly realised they would be of little help when it came to figuring out how to shrink my doctoral research into a teeny tiny series of straight-forward sentences. Instead, this is where I found the time I’ve spent writing for blogs and Twitter came in handy. Essentially, I found preparing a 3MT speech was like writing a slightly sensationalist series of tweets about my thesis aimed at family and friends. Detail? Unnecessary. Context? Irrelevant. Nuance? Meh! This was a surprising and interesting experience.
In the end, my speech felt quite divorced from my actual topic, which might well have been a symptom of a larger issue with my research. (In hindsight, my PhD topic could have been a lot more focussed.) Or perhaps my experience would have been different if I’d participated in the 3MT at a later stage of my PhD, because I’d have had some empirical findings to report on. Regardless – by sandwiching my research question into a few seconds between a catchy introduction, tidy middle and impactful ending, I found I lost much of what made my topic interesting and unique. In this sense, the 3MT felt like an exercise in bad PR, and while this was in itself instructive, the outcome wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped.
Benefits of the 3MT
I still found the experience highly worthwhile. I benefitted most from the training workshops organised by my university, where we worked together in small peer groups to refine our speeches over time. We also got powerful and targeted feedback aligned with the judging criteria. This process was invaluable, and I’m certain I improved my ability to talk about my research as a result.
I also found it genuinely inspiring to see the behind-the-scenes view of my fellow 3MT competitors as they worked to whittle down their topics and refine their deliveries. I think you can get by in the 3MT by following a fairly predicable formula which can be gleaned by watching enough good competition entries from past years. But working with others during this preparation phase was probably my favourite thing about the whole 3MT experience, and I still follow the careers of my fellow competitors with interest.
Another significant benefit of taking part in the 3MT? Visibility. Despite taking place in the early days of Australia’s lockdown, I found it helped raise my profile exponentially across my university.
Summary
Overall, taking part in the Three Minute Thesis competition made me realise that the science communication field is more fraught than I’d first expected. The decisions that go in to reducing research down in to an understandable set of sentences are far from objective. Of course, I know that all research involves subjective decisions, but I hadn’t considered just how much can be lost in translation when we seek to get our message across to non-specialist audience. That is a useful lesson in itself, and one I’m grateful I had a chance to learn in such a hands-on way.
Would I do it again? In a heart (in my mouth!) beat.
Resource: For a free resource on preparing for the 3MT®, made available by an experienced judge, follow this link: https://simonclews.com/the-three-minute-thesis-competition/
