We’re delighted to share blogs from doctoral students Kelly Curtis, the People’s Choice Award winner and David Jackson, the Judges’ Choice Award runner up from the 2024 Three Minute Thesis Competition, about their experiences and why they think our doctoral students should get involved with future competitions.
There is still time to sign up to take part in the Faculty Heat for The Faculty of Science of Engineering and The Faculty of Business and Law – visit our website to find out more.
Kelly Curtis – ‘The Power of Feedback in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition’
When I first decided to enter the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition, I honestly expected to nail it on the first go. I was in my third year of my PhD so I had talked about my research numerous times, presented at conferences, published articles, and all of this gave me the confident, yet severely misinformed, idea that my 3-minute presentation would be impeccable. Fast forward to the first round of the competition and, while my confidence still carried me through, I received a lot of feedback from the judging panel… and I mean a lot. I’m certainly someone who welcomes feedback. How else can we improve? But I was not expecting the number of questions and clarifications that were voiced after my presentation.
Initially, I had a brief, fleeting feeling of disappointment in myself, but that quickly turned into motivation to improve my speech for round two of the competition. I wrote down every question and bit of feedback shared with me and created a checklist of things to add, remove, and expand upon during a drastic rewrite of my presentation. It certainly was painful to delete certain parts of my speech that I had deemed essential to understanding my research but the reality was, if the audience didn’t deem it beneficial and there were still lingering questions about my project, even the most eloquent of phrases wasn’t painting the picture that was needed to really understand my work.
So, the cutting and slashing commenced. I deleted about two-thirds of the script I used in round one and took that feedback checklist point by point, adding in new information, clarification, and details that the judges told me they wanted to hear. I also emphasised all the areas that they were most curious about, so the edits weren’t just focused on constructive feedback. Highlighting the positives was on my agenda as well and after about five5 or six6 rewrites, I felt more confident than ever.
When the day of the University final came around, I had spent days practicing my new speech, also noting the judges’ feedback about how I was presenting and felt totally calm and prepared. I knew that my 3 minutes were packed with the essential information that the previous judges most wanted to know, and I was sure I could do it without going over time. As luck would have it, I was scheduled to present second to last, so I was afforded the opportunity to get really comfortable in the room, watch almost everyone else go before me, noting what I liked about each one, and deciding exactly how I wanted to be during my speech. When it was ‘go time’, I took a deep breath and settled into myself and all the practice I’d done, knowing that I had incorporated all the details from my feedback. Getting a laugh from the audience right out of the gate when they saw my slide certainly helped, and it felt like the room was on my side. That we were somehow in this together.
During the judging, I felt confident in my performance and, no matter the outcome, I knew that I had done my best and really took all that feedback to heart. It was out of my hands now. And when the results were shared, I had won the People’s Choice Award. The audience had voted for me as their favourite presentation of the day. While I do give myself credit for this achievement, I know that when it comes down to it, the feedback from round one was the crucial element that had the biggest impact on my success. Because I consciously utilised the feedback from the first audience, it allowed me to cater my speech to the audience of round two, so it makes sense that they appreciated my presentation enough to vote me for People’s Choice.
If you’re considering participating in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition, my recommendation to you is to embrace the feedback shared in round one. Create a checklist with both the positives and not-so-positives and then cut, scrap, edit and emphasise. It may seem daunting after all the preparation you’ve already done, but it is key in being able to step outside yourself and tailor your speech to what the audience wants to know about and understand when it comes to your work, rather than those pesky details you want to share. The audience is the target, and your feedback is the roadmap to get to them.
Kelly Curtis is a doctoral student at Manchester Met who is researching how different types of exposure to death and dying impacts people and their beliefs about death, dying, the afterlife, and the paranormal.
David Jackson – ‘Do you Understand it Well Enough to Explain it Simply?’
As a doctoral student, you live and breathe your research project. The hours of reading, interviewing, journaling and analysing leads you down rabbit holes of exploration, curiosity, dead ends and breakthroughs. Even with the support of a great supervisory team, you are always to some degree on your own – getting ever deeper into the complexity of what it is you are discovering.
So, when somebody asks you to summarise your work in three minutes you are suddenly brought back into the everyday world and faced with the challenge of translating what you are doing into a language that anybody could understand. Whether you believe it was Feynman or Einstein who said it, we have all heard the idea that ‘if you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it well enough’. This is what the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition is all about: summarising your work in an engaging way for an audience of non-specialists.
How do you begin to summarise years of work in three minutes! What to include? What to leave out? How to explain abstract concepts in a way that could be understood?
My initial attempt came in at around six minutes. After paring it down to its absolute minimum, I got it to four minutes and 20 seconds. For me, everything clicked into place when I realised that the really important story about my research was the product of it, and how it changes the world. To that end, I ditched the sections about methodology and extant theory, and went straight into what I learned and why it matters. In this way, I was able to get it down to three minutes and grab the attention of the audience and panel who saw fit to award me the Judges’ Choice runner up award.
Although I was stepping out of my comfort zone by entering this competition, I am so glad that I did. In addition to being able to develop a simple narrative of my research in my own mind, the competition led to lots of conversations with people working in other areas that have helped me to see how my work can connect up with work across disciplines. As a mature part time doctoral student with a full-time job and a family away from campus, I have never really felt part of a community of peers – but participating in the 3MT® competition has changed all that and enabled me to connect with others who now know something about me, and more importantly, about my work.
David is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Business and Law.
