As faculty and students who have attended MA or PhD oral defences can attest, a typical précis for a thesis can last from 15-30 minutes and tackles the monumental task of summarizing 40,000-80,000 words of research and argumentation. 

Last Thursday, February 26^th, fourteen graduate students gathered in the thesis defence room to compete in the FASS semi-finals for SFU's Three Minute Thesis Competition.

A wide range of disciplines were represented by both MA and PhD graduate students including: Tarah Hodgkinson and Kyle Sutherland in Criminology; Sazid Hasan and Soheil Mahmoodzadeh in Economics; Laura Booi in Gerontology; Joana Bettocchi-Barrow in Latin American Studies; Emanuela Mileva in Linguistics; Rina Kashyap and Nancy Teeple in Political Science; and Senay Cebioglu, John Gaspar, Scott Neufeld, and Bertrand Sager in Psychology.

And the winners are:

• First Place: Senay Cebioglu (Psychology) for “Becoming Human: Developing Self-Awareness.”
• Second Place: Bertrand Sager (Psychology) for, “Perception of Oncoming Motorcycles While Preparing a Left Turn.”
• Third Place: Joana Bettocchi-Barrow (Latin American Studies) for “Health in Distant Fields.”
• People’s Choice: Emanuela Mileva (Linguistics) “Getting to know your patient: talk in alternative medicine sessions as a blend of mainstream medicine and psychotherapy.”

Each of the winners received a cash prize and finalists Senay Cebioglu and Emanuela Mileva will represent FASS at the SFU Three Minute Thesis Finals on March 9th.