The University of Birmingham recently held a '3 minute thesis' competition (3MT).
3MT is a brilliant idea, and involves PhD researchers explaining their thesis to a general audience in 3 minutes with no props and using only one stationary slide.
The competition was started in Australia, and has since spread across the world. The interest was quite high at UoB, and there was a round of heats (one for each college) and then a grand final.
I was one of two from the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences that made it through to the final, and joined the other 9 finalists on 27th September in the Great Hall to present my work. Below is a photo of me presenting taken by one of my colleagues in the office.
I used my slide (shown below) to illustrate the increase in the amount of hydrogen (the blue dots) that you can store in a certain volume using a metal hydride (right) instead of a compressed gas tank (left) using my favourite analogy of shoes in a shoe rack vs shoes in a mess!
The videos have now been posted online, with mine found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=
I found the feedback very interesting: a number of non-scientists (including the judges) came up to me and congratulated me on how I had managed to present quite a complicated scientific concept in an understandable way. However, the judges on the panel with a scientific background thought I used the analogy too much, so it seems you can't please everyone! Annoyingly we didn't get to hear the other finalists' presentations, but the UoB winner's video is linked below:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/philosophy/news/2013/oram-tmt.aspx
I know I'll definitely be back next year, with a year's more research to squeeze into 3 minutes!
3MT is a brilliant idea, and involves PhD researchers explaining their thesis to a general audience in 3 minutes with no props and using only one stationary slide.
The competition was started in Australia, and has since spread across the world. The interest was quite high at UoB, and there was a round of heats (one for each college) and then a grand final.
I was one of two from the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences that made it through to the final, and joined the other 9 finalists on 27th September in the Great Hall to present my work. Below is a photo of me presenting taken by one of my colleagues in the office.
I used my slide (shown below) to illustrate the increase in the amount of hydrogen (the blue dots) that you can store in a certain volume using a metal hydride (right) instead of a compressed gas tank (left) using my favourite analogy of shoes in a shoe rack vs shoes in a mess!
The videos have now been posted online, with mine found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=
I found the feedback very interesting: a number of non-scientists (including the judges) came up to me and congratulated me on how I had managed to present quite a complicated scientific concept in an understandable way. However, the judges on the panel with a scientific background thought I used the analogy too much, so it seems you can't please everyone! Annoyingly we didn't get to hear the other finalists' presentations, but the UoB winner's video is linked below:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/ptr/departments/philosophy/news/2013/oram-tmt.aspx
I know I'll definitely be back next year, with a year's more research to squeeze into 3 minutes!
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