 Hi, I'm Inga Muver and Director of Research Training here at the Australian National University. Today I'm going to be talking about the three most common mistakes I see that research students make in the three-minute thesis presentation. So the first mistake, and I think it's the most common one, is that I see students fail to connect their research with a bigger picture. They fail to tell us why we should care about their research. Research is directed towards bigger aims, so what you're doing might be one really tiny small part of actually fixing climate change or fighting disease. And I think people are really worried about talking about these bigger issues because they concentrate so much on that little part that they're doing. So the solution that I often offer people for this problem is to try to lift themselves up and get a helicopter view of the problem. So I'll give you a couple of examples of how that might work. In one student that I worked with was working with the physics of light and particularly with bending light with optical instruments. And we talked for a long time about how she could connect this research into bigger issues and eventually asked her a really stupid question really. What might your research, what could we build with your research in the future? If we imagined a whole lot of other people doing this research following along from you, what could we build? And she came up with an invisibility cloak and she ended up coming second in that competition and I think that really grabbed people's attention. The second example that I've got is a woman who was looking at nanoparticles and I got really excited because I thought nanoparticles, that's immediately interesting to me. But she said that she was looking at how emulsification worked and it turned out if you think about emulsification the process is shaking up cellar dressing. So you've got the oil and the vinegar and you have to shake them to make them actually mix together. She was looking at nanoparticles that would do this shaking without actually having to shake the bottle. So we ended up talking and talking about how this might connect into bigger issues. And she ended up calculating how much energy that it took to shake makeup bottles all over the world to actually make them all emulsified. And it was an amazing amount of energy so she worked this into her presentation and talked about manufacturing processes and making them more efficient. The second most common mistake that I see students make when they're preparing their 3MT script is that they don't work hard enough to engage our curiosity in the research. Why should we care about what this research is doing? What's in it for me is the audience asking themselves. And honestly most students are not in the best position to really highlight what's most interesting about the research. And this is kind of curious until you think about it like this. Students are suffering from the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is they've actually forgotten what it's like not to know what they know and they know so much. They know so much detail about so many things to do with their research. And they've just lost sight of what's actually interesting. So sometimes when I talk to students and I talk them through composing their script I ask them to tell me what's the most unexpected thing that you found out in your research? Sometimes this takes a really long time for them to tell me. But I found out some really interesting things. For instance, did you know that when you eat too much silver in your diet your tongue turns blue? And that when you're watering plants you're not actually making the leaves plumper. You're giving the plants electrons. And when the students told me these things I was really interested but they were like why are you even interested in that? That's completely obvious and I say well not to me. So what's the solution to this? You really need to talk to people who have no idea about your research. I'm talking about maybe your parents, maybe your siblings, maybe people down the pub. Talk to them, tell them about your research, listen to yourself. If you can, just tape yourself on your phone and then you'll find yourself telling people all sorts of things and you can gauge from their reaction what it is that's actually really interesting about your research that you've forgotten. The third most common problem I see is people neglecting the visual component of the three minute thesis presentation. It's one slide. One slide with no transition, no animation, no sound. Just one slide. It sounds very difficult and actually it is. And I think that most people get to the slide really as an afterthought and this is a mistake. If you think about the slide as being integral to the actual presentation you'll do much better. And I think our winner of the ANU final this year, Rosanna Stevens, really demonstrated that. Rosanna was talking about whiteness. So she was talking about the idea that there are white ways of doing things that we have failed to even notice anymore. And the way she demonstrated this was to have a completely blank slide. The slide itself was white and when she presented to it she asked us to imagine there were all sorts of things on this white slide also in white and we couldn't see them because they were white on white. And then later on she moved through a presentation to ask us to imagine that this white slide covered up a black background and then she got to the heart of her issue which is Indigenous culture. So I thought Rosanna's presentation was really interesting because actually the first time I saw it I thought there was a mistake that the slide deck had not actually been composed properly and of course that immediately made me pay more attention to her and her research. And she did very well all the way through the competition. I think the impact of this white slide was really telling. So how can you mobilise this in your visuals? Well a lot of us don't have such an easy hook with our research and our images. So play it safe if you have to. Imagine there's a grid on your slide deck and you're lining up the images. Don't cross over the corners to try and make it more interesting. Don't fade out the edges. Just put the images on a simple grid to simple fonts because fonts that move between different platforms can often change their size and their orientation and you won't know what it looks like in the final presentation. And finally if you can't do that, find one image. One really key impactful image that you can use. We call this the hero shot and just put one image on your slide. The biggest mistake you can make is just not even have a go. We all make mistakes. That's how we get better. That's how we learn. I've made a lot of mistakes making this video. It's people failing to connect what their research is doing. My own research was about hand gestures. My own research was about hand gestures. When we do online, my first mistake is... I nearly got it right. I'll just do it one more time. But the biggest mistake you can make is to just not even have a go. The three I meant... See, I shouldn't try and add things in. But next time I'll do it better. Won't I, Lachlan?