Three Minute Thesis Competition

First developed by the University of Queensland in 2008, the Three Minute Thesis competition (3MT®) challenges research students to communicate the significance of their projects to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes.

Building on the success of the Trans-Tasman competition, a U21 Grand Final is now taking place in October 2013. Each participating member will hold their own internal 3MT competition to select a local winner who will then be put forward for the U21 final, to be judged by an international panel consisting of industry and academic professionals. The Grand Final will be a virtual event where video entries rather than live presentations will be judged. Two prizes will be available for participants in this event:

• Judge's Choice: Prizewinner will receive a bursary of US$2,500 to visit a U21 university of their choice, to benefit their research or on-going career development.
• People's Choice: Prizewinner will receive US$300.

3MT provides research students with the opportunity to develop their academic, presentation, and research communication skills by explaining their research to an intelligent but non-specialist audience.  The local competitions will challenge the students to present face-to-face, and additionally the virtual final will hone skills associated from being filmed for an international audience, receiving international peer review, and gaining skills surrounding the presentation of their research to a wider audience.

Not only will students benefit from this experience, but members have the opportunity to showcase their research and researchers throughout the network, as well as open doors to new collaborations and networks for both researchers and supervisors.  

This inaugural event is an exciting new initiative for the network which has already confirmed inclusion of researchers from 17 universities across nine countries and territories.

Key Dates

Member Universities will be asked to submit their videos to U21 by Friday 11 October.

The winners will be announced on Tuesday 29 October.

For more information, guidelines and showcase clips, please visit the University of Queensland 3MT website: http://threeminutethesis.org/

More details of how to submit entries will be made available in due course, but if you have any queries, please contact Gemma Marakas (g.marakas@bham.ac.uk).  

A 'how to' video detailing how to develop your video presentation for the U21 3MT competition is available below. You can also download the video script at the bottom of this page: