Three Minute Thesis winners

Congratulations to 3MT winner Tessa Innocent-Bernard from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her thesis on Evaporation in Oil Sand Thickened Tailings: The Path to Reclamation took first place and a cash prize at Carleton’s competition. Innocent-Bernard will compete next at the provincial championships being held at Queen’s University on April 18.

Brian Crosland, from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, took third place for his presentation of Cleaner Air from Fire and Lasers.

Also in the Top 10 was Adam Vigneron,  Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Sophie Lamothe, Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism.

Masters and doctoral students battled for top honours in Carleton’s inaugural Three Minute Thesis Competition (3MT) on Wednesday.

“In three minutes or less, each of the 20 grad students who participated wowed the crowd with their concise and compelling explanations of their research and how it impacts our lives,” said Wallace Clement, dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs. “This is not an easy feat considering the depth and complexity of research conducted at the graduate level.”

 

UPDATE: this article by Tom Spears, appeared in the OTTAWA CITIZEN April 16, 2013

OTTAWA – 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 Ontario-wide Three-Minute Thesis competition at Queen’s University on April 18.

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 three-minute 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.

Crosland’s actual PhD work says things like: “The output of a pulsed Nd: YAG laser (Litron Lasers Ltd., LPY-642T-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, StockerYale 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. And from there 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 contest helps students to think about how to communicate their work to people outside their profession, said organizer Leah DeVellis of Carleton.

“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.”