There are predictable hurdles in turning a massive research project into a succinct 3 minute summary. More so when that 3 minute summary is intended for a lay-audience, as opposed to experts in that given field! In any other year, Yale’s 3-Minute Thesis Competition provides a fair number of challenges, from the construction of said summary, to the creation of a single PowerPoint slide used to convey key details, to presenting all this information in front of a crowd of over 200 attendees! But that would be in any other year, as the Covid-19 global pandemic unfortunately put a stop to this year’s scheduled 3MT finals for this past April. However, several months later, our intrepid finalists have risen to a new set of challenges and are ready to see this competition to a natural (albeit altered) conclusion.
The 2020 3-Minute Thesis Competition finalists have returned to the field of competition, in this time of Zoom and social distancing, to see their efforts reach the intended conclusion of determining this year’s winners. Using the video recording platform Panopto (with key assistance from our collaborators at the Poorvu Center for Teaching & Learning and the Graduate Writing Lab), finalists have diligently transformed their in-person presentations into recorded presentations in a manner of weeks. Be it from their apartments or their research labs, they are able to truly show us that the world is a stage. Now we can collectively celebrate their research and efforts.
Starting the week of November 30th, the Office of Career Strategy will be releasing a few of our finalists’ videos each day via the Office of Career Strategy YouTube channel. During this time, our 3MT judges will deliberate these presentations and select this year’s winners. We will also be asking the Yale community to determine their favorite presentations, to which the winners will receive a special award (one for Best in Humanities/Social Sciences and one for Best in STEM). To both vote for your preferred videos and/or attend our award ceremony, be sure to register via Eventbrite. The winners will be announced at the award ceremony via Zoom on Tuesday, December 8th at 12:30pm ET. We look forward to seeing you there, celebrating the hard work and flexibility of this year’s finalists, and crowning this year’s Yale 3MT champion!
