Three Minute Thesis 2023 at CMU

The History of 3MT

The Three Minute Thesis (or 3MT, for short) is a competition that challenges Ph.D. students to explain their research in three minutes to a non-specialist audience. At least that’s the description provided by the University of Queensland (UQ), which founded the competition. To me, it was never meant to be a competition per se. It was more of a self-imposed challenge rather than a competition. In the end, I left this experience with a sense of accomplishment, which was my goal from the very beginning.

The competition has evolved significantly since its first occurrence at UQ, in 2008. Fun fact: the idea for the competition came about at a time when the state of Queensland was suffering severe drought [1], and so to conserve water many people would time their showers with a 3-minute egg timer. The then Dean of the Graduate School connected the dots and the result: 3MT was born. Today, 3MT competitions are held in over 900 universities across more than 85 countries [1], with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) being one of them.

My Experience

The competition consists of two stages. The first stage involves multiple preliminary rounds, each with several candidates. The number of candidates in each preliminary round varies. To you an idea, I recollect that there were about 10 candidates in my preliminary round and about 8 rounds total. The second stage is the 3MT Championship, which gathers the preliminary rounds’ winners.

I was very determined to join this competition. Mainly, I wanted to challenge myself, as I had never presented on stage in front of a large audience before. In the preliminary round, I wasn’t feeling very nervous, though I got worried when they announced I was the winner. I was worried about what was to come next, as I didn’t expect that outcome. My inner dialogue was something like “Ok Sofia, you weren’t counting on it, but now you’ve to stick with it till the end”.

The championship came and I was feeling very nervous, as you might expect. The championship was being broadcast, so I knew my family and my advisors were tunned, which added some extra pressure. Nevertheless, I tried to maintain calm and I revisited my script before my turn to present. Fortunately, it all went well and I didn’t miss a word (check out the presentation at the bottom of this post!). In the final moments of the championship, the winners were announced, and even though I didn’t get to the podium, I felt happy with my performance and proud of myself for pushing myself beyond my comfort zone. After all, that was the goal all along!

References

• [1] Higher Degrees by Research…Start your 3MT journey here. (2021, December 8). Three Minute Thesis - University of Queensland.