ELI Lecturers Christine Feak and Brenda Imber worked with the Office of PhD and Research Administration in U-M’s Ross School of Business to put on a 3-Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition for students in Ross’s Institute for Faculty in Training (IFIT).

The 3MT® is a research communication competition developed by The University of Queensland which is now held at universities around the world. The competition gives PhD students an opportunity to develop their academic, presentation, and research communication skills. Its goal is to develop research students' capacity to effectively explain their research in a language appropriate to an educated non-specialist audience.  

The judges, who included ELI Director Angelo Pitillo and Julie Evershed, Director of U-M's Language Resource Center, awarded first place to Chen Zhang, for her presentation Being Bad When Being Busy? Exploring Underlying Reasons and Buffering Factors. In second place, for Water Systems, Private or Public?, was Dan Zhao, who also took the Audience Award.

This fall and winter, the ELI will partner with the Rackham Graduate School to sponsor the second annual University-wide 3MT® competition.