The seconds ticked by for contestants striving to cram their massive amounts of research, sometimes amounting to 80,000 words, into three minutes.
UF doctoral students of all disciplines competed Thursday in the Reitz Union Grand Ballroom to win $500 and the chance to continue to the regional competition. This was the first Three Minute Thesis competition at UF, where 11 contestants compressed their graduate theses into three-minute presentations without outside props except for one PowerPoint slide.
The winner, Michael Shultz, is a UF graduate student doing research on pediatric osteosarcoma, bone cancer in children.
Nina Zagvazdina, a third-year UF entomology graduate student, went to the event to find out a presentation style she could use for her research.
“It was a great low-commitment way to find out what people are doing,” she said. “I wanted to get an exposure to different speech style.”
Ruth Perez, a clerk in the UF graduate school who helped organize the competition, said the goal was to expose the audience to a higher level of research.
“Our goal is to demystify what our graduate students are doing,” she said. “Sometimes what they are doing can be very complicated — and most of us are not going to get a Ph.D. ourselves — so we can’t speak to them at that same level.”
[A version of this story ran on page 10 on 4/4/2014 under the headline "Graduate students shorten their theses for competition"]
