On March 18, WGSS PhD Candidate Ashley Barry took 2nd place in the 2024 Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Challenge.

Each year, the Graduate School invites doctoral students to compete in a competition designed to enhance their research and communication skills to more effectively share their work with the wider public. This spring, fifteen Stony Brook students – from across a wide range of inter/disciplines – took part in the challenge. They worked with professional development mentors to distill their dissertation projects into 3 minute presentations for a general audience, using only a single PowerPoint slide!

Ashley spoke with the Stony Brook News team about her experience:

“This experience has been fulfilling,” said Barry. “Being the only humanities participant has been really interesting because I see the fundamentals of science communication and what kind of principles I can transfer over to humanities.”

Barry said being in the humanities had both advantages and disadvantages.

People may be more familiar with the work because I study film, but getting them to see the academic rigor of it is another challenge entirely,” she said. “We’ve been working with the Alda Center and that’s been really useful to figure out the audience and rhetorical goals of conveying my research. I had to think about the research outside of the academy, how you want it to hit people, and what you want them thinking about as they leave the room.”

Read more about the competition here. Or just enjoy Ashley’s presentation below!