The Faculty of Arts hosted its third annual 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) heat on March 12 with 15 graduate students competing in a tight race. A strong advocate for 3MT, Dean Douglas Peers likened the calibre of research presented by Arts students to the 3MT National Competition last year where he was a judge.
But among the impressive performances in the Arts heat, two students rose to the top of the judges' score cards and were announced as the winners: Joseph Buscemi, a PhD candidate in History, and K. Yourie Kim, a PhD candidate in Psychology.
“The entire event is immediately useful. Sitting down and distilling your thesis to an elevator pitch really helped me conceptualize the fundamentals of my dissertation,” says Joseph Buscem. “It's also valuable to get more practice speaking off-page in front of people, especially for those of us interested in teaching. Usually, I'm not used to having all eyes in a room on me unless I broke something expensive, so this was a terrific experience.”
3MT competitors show one static slide and may take no more than three minutes to present the breadth and significance of their graduate research to a panel of Arts judges comprised of faculty, staff and alumni. The Arts heat was chaired and hosted by Professor James Skidmore.
“You end up digging deeper into your own understanding of your research while also stepping out of it to imagine how a third party would understand your work,” explains Yourie Kim. “After the presentation, you notice just from regular conversations with friends and family that you have become more attuned to how you’re explaining your work and your research. You learn from the 3MT that presentations are not about you, they're about the audience.”
2015 Faculty of Arts 3MT presentations
- Criminal and Neural Tube Defects in Ancient Greece: An Investigation Into Incidence and Causation (Anthropology)
- Empire, Union, and Beyond (History)
- Tongues Tide: Translingual Directions (English)
- Television and the Single Girl (History)
- Protect and Survive: The Recently Declassified History of Britain's Cold War Nuclear Survival Plans (History)
- Voices in the Frames: Conceptualizing Canadian-Connected Terrorism (Sociology)
- We're All in This Together: An Examination of Mass Graves and Multiple Burials in Ancient Greece (Anthropology)
- Multiline Slots: Can Losing be Reinforcing? (Psychology)
- Child, Family, and School Capital: Contributions in Children's Early Literacy Achievement (Sociology)
- The History of the Canadian Video Game Industry (History)
- Discovering Entrepreneurial Intent: Application of an Expanded Model of Career Choice Motivation (Psychology)
- North End Narratives: Living in an Urban Environment (Anthropology)
- Love in the Time of Caller ID: Understanding the Role of Technology in Committed Relationships (Sociology)
- Gods and Monsters: Drag Bodies and Nineteenth-Century British Art and Literature (English)
- Only Connect: The Virtual Communities of David Foster Wallace and Gertrude Stein (English)
Buscemi and Kim will advance to the University-wide 3MT competition on Thursday, April 2 at 2:30pm in Humanities Theatre. 10 finalists from the 6 faculties will compete for a spot at the 3MT Provincial Competition at Western University.
Joseph Buscemi’s research
My research is on Britain's secret civil defence program called Protect and Survive. It was developed in the mid 70s, "leaked" in the late 70s, and then openly sold in the early 80s. It hasn't been studied much to date, probably because many of the documents were classified until a few years ago, so my work aims to discuss the program's authorship, leak, dissemination, and cultural reverberations. Protect and Survive was a series of booklets and videos containing largely useless tips, at times contradicting itself, so there's a natural human-interest level that people gravitate towards and I really enjoy discussing it with them.
Yourie Kim’s research
My research is on career search motivation using entrepreneurship as the career in question. I argue that there are three factors that influence your decision to choose a particular career: interests, desired outcomes, and values. I hypothesize that the more you perceive a career, in my case entrepreneurship, to involve your interests, desired outcomes, and values, the greater your attraction to that career. Results support this hypothesis such that engaging in a group discussion that talks about ways in which entrepreneurship can involve these three factors leads to an increase in entrepreneurial intent.
