Graduate students squeeze research into 3 minutes

Carolina graduate students spend years digging into complicated subjects — from politics to children’s media to novel ways to treat chronic disease ––  for lengthy dissertations filled with academic language.  At the Three Minute Thesis competition in October, they had 180 seconds to explain all that work to a general audience.

The Graduate School’s annual 3MT is designed to sharpen public speaking and storytelling. Students say it’s practice for moments such as job interviews, conversations with a policymaker or reporter or meetings with potential funders. The school’s CareerWell team offers participants workshops and consultations.

Read about three projects from the competition.

Bugs as drugs

Alita Miller, a doctoral candidate in pharmaceutical sciences at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, won first place for “Bugs as Drugs: A New Way to Treat Inflammatory Bowel Disease.” Miller will represent UNC-Chapel Hill at the regional 3MT competition, hosted by the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools.

Miller is developing enhanced probiotics — the “good bacteria” people often take for gut health — to help treat inflammatory bowel diseases. She hopes to translate that research into therapies and into leadership in the biotech world.

“One big aspect of leading teams or leading a company is being able to communicate in a very easy to understand way,” she said. “That’s what I learned through the 3MT experience.”

Dialects in children’s TV shows

Nicole Peterson, a doctoral candidate in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, won the People’s Choice award for “Intersections of Dialect, Gender, Race and Class in Children’s Television.” Her research examines how streaming shows for children portray different dialects — specifically Southern accents and African American Vernacular English — and how those portrayals can reinforce stereotypes or erase authentic voices.

“I can’t present 200 pages of research in an interview, but I can get them to listen for three minutes,” Peterson said.

Peterson’s preliminary findings show that of the more than 1,000 characters studied, about 4% used a Southern accent and less than 3% used an AAVE accent.

Stereotyping of characters with Southern and African American Vernacular English accents included depicting both as nonhuman and Southern speakers as poor, uncultured and low class. Women with AAVE-accents tend to be depicted as managers and modern strong Black women, while men with AAVE-accents are often shown as emotionally immature and broken.

For Peterson, the clarity from preparing is critical to her career. “Our most marketable skill is our ability to communicate. You’re going to have to talk to people. AI is not going to get rid of that.”

Political prediction markets

Parker Bach, also a Hussman doctoral student, won second place for “Who Called It? Information, Culture and Public Opinion on Political Prediction Markets.” He researches prediction markets –– platforms where people wager on future events –– with a focus on election outcomes. “Journalists often treat odds in prediction markets like they’re science, so I want to know how people decide to bet in them,” he said.

Bach found:

• Around the 2024 elections, journalists started reporting on prediction market odds alongside or in place of poll-based forecasts.
• After the election, news references to prediction markets as evidence continued on topics beyond just elections.
• The more journalists report market odds like scientific fact, the more incentive there is for people with money to move markets artificially to make news.
• Prediction markets forecast elections fairly well, but more research is needed to know how well they predict other events.

Bach called the competition “a great chance to work on not only explaining what you’re doing to a general audience but also crystallizing for yourself why that’s important,” adding that public speaking is expected of academics but rarely taught directly.

See the presentation videos.