Winning the UoN Faculty of Science 3MT® 2021 Competition

Before I started my PhD in Nottingham, I looked into opportunities for public speaking in academia. The Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT®) sounded like such a brilliant idea – apart from the competitiveness and the time pressure. I wondered what was left after discounting for these two things. Collaboration and co-creation is a fundamental value in my life and while lone wolfs may win one or two sprints, teamwork will always win the marathon. Shared success is multiplied, a shared loss is divided, and the process to get where you are is fulfilling in itself. The time pressure part, however, I do understand. One of my favourite books is Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran, the book of aphorisms. “If you sing of beauty though alone in the heart of the desert you will have an audience”. Give it a read if you want to appreciate the grandeur of concise words. Creativity emerges from limitations, and three minutes time for a three-year-long project sounds like an awful lot of the latter, and much of room for the first.

“It’s the only thing that I haven’t done during my PhD, and I very much wish I had!”

– not me

I had a lot of stuff on my to-do list when the time of the competition arrived. I had several conferences to prepare for, reports to write, exams to mark. But in the end, the words of a dear friend and colleague (quoted above) convinced me to just give it a shot anyway. It doesn’t have to be good, but you can only win the lottery if you buy the ticket. Equipped with only the title of my speech – a brilliant metaphor that stuck with me ever since I heard it at one of my Positive Psychology peer group meetings (thanks a lot, Amit!) – I somehow came up with a script, recorded it, prepared a slide, and handed it in. Some days later I was surprisingly invited as a finalist, revised some parts of the speech, pitched it to my colleagues, received a lot of smiles, and looked forward to the big finale.

And it worked, I won the competition! But it was not the victory that made this endeavor so worthwhile. There was much more both my competitors and I gained during the time of preparing. It is difficult to fit three years into three minutes – particularly if you have the last year still ahead. But once you created your elevator pitch, you have an outline of your whole thesis narrative: No need to focus on things no one wants to know or hear; great need to focus on the fundamentals. After the competition, we knew our fundamentals. It’s an abstract of the abstract, just in a less abstract form, because it is aimed at a non-scientific audience. Brilliant!

You can find my winning speech in the video above. It’s a test run I recorded half an hour before the meeting (the official record shows faces of other people, and this is more GDPR conform).