How not to lighten up your research

By Janice Tibbetts. The three-minute thesis competition isn’t the best way to learn to communicate. As a recent master’s student at Carleton University, I was mystified by an email that popped up in my inbox this winter advertising the three-minute thesis competition, an event that is sweeping Canadian universities. The idea is that master’s and doctoral students compete for prize money to explain their often-complex research to judges and an audience – in three minutes or less. 
I couldn’t help think that this upstart competition, dubbed the 3MT, was in fact the antithesis of a thesis – a game-show type of exercise that could reduce big thoughts and academic research into mush. For me, the 3MT certainly prompted the question of whether academic researchers should be in the business of embracing an era of short attention spans, a world in which you should be able to say something succinctly or not at all. Read more...