Personal Story
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue53 1–31 July 2024
For those who I haven't met yet, my name is Neco Kriel, and I am a third-year PhD student broadly working on understanding how galaxies like our Milky Way became so magnetised.
This year I have been participating in ANU's Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, and despite what the event's name suggests, this experience has extended far beyond just three minutes! Let me tell you a bit about it!
Now, preparation for my talk involved a lot of contemplation about the story I wanted to tell, and countless chats with friends to tweak my script (p.s., thanks everyone!), all of which translated to more than 10 iterations of a 600 word script, and many more versions of my background slide. Though all of this work was for a talk over in just 3 minutes, it was totally worth it! Yes, this experience has helped me improve my public speaking skills, but more importantly, it allowed me to see and appreciate astronomy research from a new perspective, and also showed me my place in it.
Of course, it is essential that every 3MT should accessible by everyone, and fit within the three minute time-keep. With this comes a fun challenge: finding ways to simplify the complex ideas and vocabulary we have all grown so accustomed to, and explain only the most necessary details as quickly as you can. And surprisingly, once the complexities and extraneous language had been stripped away, I realised that the ideas underlying my talk were far more simple than I had realised! Statements like 'galaxies colliding' turned into 'galaxies gobbling each other up,' and boring tools like 'simulations' turned into 'powerful computational laboratories that allow us to build galaxies here on Earth!' There were lots of these fun opportunities to employ vivid imagery!
Walking away from the ANU's College of Science (CoS) Heats, I was very fortunate to win 'Best Science Talk,' and especially glad to hear that the audience had also voted for me and my magnetic fields as their favourite talk! It’s reassuring to see there is interest in theoretical astrophysics beyond the Stromlo borders!
RSAA is now two for two in getting to the ANU 3MT finals! This is despite us only having one person enter the competition each year. So, I would like to encourage and challenge you all, if you are a PhD student, consider doing the 3MT! The stakes are low, and the rewards are great. At the bare minimum you are walking away with a buck load of fun and the experience of sharing your thoughts and work with others! This is nothing to say about how compelling and engaging astrophysics content is! It is so well-suited to the 3MT format! So, start thinking about your field. What is your hook? What question is your field trying to answer? How do you explain that to someone in two (short) sentences? These are the kinds of questions you will need to be asking yourself next year when you prepare your talk!
Neco Kriel
Image: Neco giving his 3MT thesis talk in the CoS heats.
