North Alabama will participate for the first time in Three Minute Thesis competition.

“Three Minute Thesis is a process that is a part of the University of Queensland in Australia,” said Lisa Keys-Mathews, director of the Quality Enhancement Program. “They have their Ph.D. students take their entire life’s work and their dissertation and condense it down to three minutes.”

The goal of the program is being able to get your research across in three minutes to a layman. If you can achieve this, then it is a successful body of work and presentation, Keyes-Mathews said.

Though Three Minute Thesis originated at the University of Queensland, from 2009 to 2011 the competition expanded to 170 universities in over 17 countries around the world, according to the competition’s website.

“It’s kind of proliferated out of Queensland, Australia and across the world,” Keys-Mathews said. “In the United States there are multiple universities doing these three minute talks at the graduate level — we are one of probably two or three universities doing it at the undergraduate level.”

Maisey Hunter said she enjoys being a first-year participant. Her thesis looked at the electron scattering of buckyballs, magnetic silver balls made of sixty carbon atoms.

“It’s completely new to UNA so it’s interesting to be able to say I was in it the first time,” Hunter said. “This was totally new, no one knew what was going on, but I had the guts to do it. It’s just a fun thing to do — to share your research with someone else.”

Research is a way for students to show potential employers they know how to solve a problem, Key-Mathews said.

“Think about spending an entire semester or an entire year on a research project, but having to know your information so well that you get into an elevator and you’re going up five floors and you can tell somebody in that elevator exactly what you’re doing, and they get off that elevator and they’ve understood it,” Keys-Mathews said.

Three Minute Thesis helps its participants explain their research to average people, Hunter said.

“It’s definitely benefitted me a lot already,” Hunter said. “When you talk about stuff in these types of situations, you can’t explain things how you normally would.

“When I’m talking to other physicists, I can talk about hydrochlorides, electrons scattering cross sections and all these other things, but for the Three Minute Thesis you have to consider what you’re saying and consider your audience.”

Political Science major Zach Roberson, who presented a thesis on how a person’s income level affects their views on government spending, thinks the competition gives its participants experience with public speaking.

“It’s just more experience in public speaking,” Roberson said. “It gives you a chance to present your ideas, present your research and hear other people’s feedback. It’s always good to have good experience talking, it looks good on a resume.”

Keys-Mathews encourages students to come to at least one Three Minute Thesis session.

“Being able to listen with a discerning ear and understand what that person is saying helps you learn what’s going on in the university and what’s going on in the world,” Keys-Mathews said.