Watson Graduate School students participate in Three Minute Thesis competition

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Last Thursday, the Oklahoma State University Graduate College hosted the Interdisciplinary Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition preliminary round. Four of the 11 participants were doctoral students from the Watson Graduate School of Management.

In this competition, each student has a maximum of three minutes to present his or her thesis. The student is limited to a single PowerPoint slide and must verbally present the information. The winner of this competition advances to the 3MT competition finals taking place March 3.

Watson Graduate School of Management students took home three of the four awards: second-place winner Alex Scrimpshire, third-place winner Yasamin Vahdati, and the People’s Choice winner Pankush Kalgotra. The other Watson Graduate School student who participated in the competition was Peter Liang.

Ramesh Sharda, vice dean of the Watson Graduate School of Management, was pleased with how well the students represented Spears School of Business.

“I consider 3MT to be a very important activity to help students prepare to present their research projects succinctly and clearly,” said Sharda. “Although I wish that more students from Spears School had participated in the university competition, I am pleased that our students did very well in the eyes of the judges and the folks who were present in the room. My congratulations to the winners.”

Scrimpshire, along with the first-place winner Ashley Rankin, will advance to the final round of the 3MT competition.

The 3MT competition was created in 2008 at the University of Queensland.

The 3MT competitions were designed for students to present work that would normally take about nine hours in three minutes or less. This competition also provides students with the opportunity to develop the proper communication skills to present the important and relevant aspects of their research to audiences outside of their fields of study.

The other students who participated in the Interdisciplinary 3MT preliminary round were, Amandeep Arora, Lynn Maddison, Alexander Rohan Johns, Wakun Lam, Kip Teegardin, and Natarianto Indrawan.

The 3MT final presentations will take place at 3:30 p.m. March 3 in the Student Union Little Theater on the OSU-Stillwater campus.

For more information, visit https://gradcollege.okstate.edu/3mt.