Students give thesis — in 3 minutes
Distilling hours and pages of research into 180 seconds of jargonfree speech teaches communication skills, writes TOM SPEARS.
Grad students at Ottawa universities have spent this month whittling down years of their academic lives into a three-minute speech with no technical jargon.
The aim: Winning this year’s provincewide Three-Minute Thesis competition at Queen’s University on Thursday.
The bigger aim: Realizing that some day they will have to explain what they do to members of the public who don’t have their specialized training.
And those students who took part discovered that being simple isn’t easy but the results are rewarding.
“For years you put your nose to the grindstone, and you can lose sight of the big picture,” said Brian Crosland, a PhD engineering student at Carleton University. Wrapping everything into a threeminute drill has helped him focus.
Each university began with an internal competition and will send its top two contestants to Queen’s.
Carleton’s winner, Tessa Innocent-Bernard, has a secret weapon: her experience teaching Grades 5 and 6 in St. Lucia.
The young engineer managed to describe technical material about oilsands tailings in plain English. But a bigger problem was condensing 270 pages of thesis into 180 seconds. That’s less than a second per page.
And those 270 pages look like this: “The flocs settle quickly releasing water of low turbidity (less than 6.5 clarity corresponding to less than 0.5% solids concentration) and producing an underflow of increased solids concentration of up to about 50-55%.”
Obviously a rewrite was in order. But what should she include?
“You want to get the audience engaged, but you don’t want to give them too much information. But at the same time, everything seems important because you’ve just spent almost two years working on this,” she said.
As well, her thesis is full of charts and diagrams. Contest rules limit students to a single slide.
“Actually it was fun — and a learning experience,” she concluded.
Panos Argyropoulos, a master’s student in chemistry and the winner at University of Ottawa, explains how erythromycin, an antibiotic with a large and complex molecule, is made.
He says science communication isn’t taught in classes and that more students should enter next year as a way of preparing for a role in society.
“We’re all so dedicated to what we’re doing that to explain it even to our parents is difficult,” he said.
Crosland’s PhD work says things such as : “The output of a pulsed Nd: YAG laser (Litron Lasers Ltd., LPY642T-10) operating at 1064 nm and a pulse width of about 10 ns was focused into a sheet using a Powell lens (Laser Line Generator, Stocker-Yale Canada). The laser fluence was adjusted using a half-wave plate and thin-film polarizer.”
And that’s not even counting the equations full of Greek letters. But for the three-minute version he talked about a Coke can, which releases a hiss of gas when it’s opened. That’s like the natural gas released when people drill for oil, he explained. He went on to discuss what happens to the escaping gas — “we burn it” — and the soot that results.
He wrestled with words. Technically it’s called flaring, not burning, but he felt flaring might confuse people so he went with the simpler word.
Crossland, who practised on his family over Christmas, seeks out chances to discuss his work. He has a stutter and figures the best way to handle it is to get practice, which includes speaking at Toastmasters meetings. This was one more step, and he placed third among 22 entries from Carleton.
The top Queen’s student, Xiaoqian Liu, speaks English as a second language. The contest helps students to think about how to communicate their work to people outside their profession, said organizer Leah DeVellis of Carleton University.
“It’s important to be accessible and to reach wider audiences.
“They put so much energy into their research and into developing concepts and ideas, that to ask them to speak a different language about their topic is challenging. They feel they’re losing the significance when they’re losing that jargon,” she said. “But some of the best (entries) I’ve seen used ... metaphors or imagery to explain very complex ideas.”