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Three Minute Thesis
Find resources to help you prepare for the 3MT.
"If you can crystallise your years and years of intense study into three minutes that will captivate, entertain and educate a non-specialist audience, I’d say there isn’t a grant you can’t get or a job you can’t secure."
There are a variety of workshops and resources available to help graduate students describe their research in interesting and novel ways, and be able to communicate it in a variety of settings and contexts. These sessions are offered by a mix of service providers: Centre for Educational Excellence, Research Commons, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and Mitacs.
Spring 2023 offerings
SFU Library:
Centre for Educational Excellence:
- Presentation Foundations: Breath, Gesture, Posture & Pauses
- Expressive Speech: Your Vocal Dynamism Matters
Looking at how past competitors performed is a good way to pick up presentation tips.
In this TED Talk, Melissa Marshall shares powerful tips on presenting complex scientifc ideas to a general audience.
Julia Lane from the Faculty of Education gives some tips on "what not to do" in your 3 Minute Thesis presentation.
The SFU Library has a list of resources to help you improve your presentation skills.
The Library also offers SFU users free acess to Lynda.com's training library. It's mostly used for learning software, but they also have a great 1-hour video on Effective Public Speaking, including tips on body language. (You may need to login through the SFU Library and then do a search for "public speaking" to get to this video for free.)
There are also a large number of tutorials on Powerpoint as well as on design topics — the designing a poster tutorial would be useful for designing a good 3MT powerpoint slide.
- Lifehacker: TED's secret to great public speaking
- Forbes: How Bill Gates Radically Transformed His Public Speaking and Communication Skills
- Inger Mewburn (RMIT University): How to talk about your thesis in 3 minutes
- TED: 10 tips on how to make slides that communicate your idea, from TED’s in-house expert
- Chronicle of Higher Education: Teaching Ph.D.'s How to Reach Out
- The Thesis Whisperer: PhD Derision (see point 4 for 3MT tips)
- University of Manchester: Junk the Jargon
- University of Pennsylvania: 60-Second Lectures
- Dissertation Haiku
- Dance Your PhD
- University Affairs' series on Engaging Audiences: