Preparing for 3MT: Tips, Suggestions, and Lessons from My Journey

Three minutes may sound short. But when you are asked to explain years of research to someone outside your field, using only one static slide, those three minutes can suddenly feel like a very difficult challenge.

What should you include? What should you leave out? How technical should you be? How do you make the audience care? And even after you have prepared your speech, how do you manage the nervousness that comes with walking onto the stage?

These are some of the questions I had when I first encountered the Three Minute Thesis, or 3MT, format. Over the past two years, preparing for and participating in several 3MT competitions has changed the way I think about research communication. In this article, I want to share some of the tips, mistakes, lessons, and practical strategies that helped me along the way.

Why Participate in 3MT?

My academic background began in engineering, and I am now a researcher. One thing I strongly believe is that researchers need to be technically sound in their areas, but technical expertise alone is not always enough.

Throughout our careers, we may need to communicate our work to people who do not share our technical background, including sponsors, funding organizations, industry stakeholders, government agencies, policymakers, community organizations, journalists, and members of the public. These audiences may never read our papers or understand our equations, algorithms, terminology, or experimental details. Yet they may fund the research, translate it into practice, create policies influenced by it, or ultimately be affected by its outcomes.

I therefore believe researchers have a responsibility to make their work accessible and understandable beyond their own technical communities. That is where I see the real value of 3MT. It gives us an opportunity to practice taking something we may have spent years understanding and communicating it clearly to someone who may be hearing about it for the first time.

A Little About My 3MT Journey

You might reasonably ask where the suggestions in this article are coming from.

Interestingly, before 2025, I had never even heard of 3MT.

My journey began with the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, or IGARSS, the flagship annual conference of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. At IGARSS 2025, I was selected as one of 10 finalists from approximately 110 global submissions and received Second Prize. Later that year, I received First Place at RIT's 2025 Three Minute Thesis competition, and most recently, I received First Prize and the People's Choice Award at IEEE IGARSS 2026.

But the part of that journey I want to focus on is what happened between those competitions.

My preparation for IGARSS 2025 and RIT took approximately five to six months and involved hundreds of rehearsals, mistakes, feedback, rewriting, and gradual improvement. By the time I returned to IGARSS in 2026, the preparation was considerably easier because much of that foundation had already been built.

The suggestions that follow come from those experiences. They are not a formula for winning 3MT. Every researcher, research topic, and presentation style is different. Instead, these are the approaches that helped me improve as a research communicator, and I hope they provide a useful starting point for someone wondering, as I once did, “Where do I even begin?”

How My 3MT Journey Started

When I first encountered 3MT through IGARSS 2025 in Brisbane, Australia, I knew almost nothing about the format. I went to the University of Queensland 3MT website to understand its origin and purpose. I studied the rules and judging criteria and watched presentations from previous winners, paying attention to how they structured their stories, used the single slide, opened and closed, and communicated technical research to a broad audience.

Three minutes. One static slide. Years of research. I was unsure what to include, what to leave out, and how technical the presentation should be. My first experience taught me a great deal, especially about what I needed to improve. I walked too much, spoke too quickly, did not pause enough, used limited hand gestures, and although my slide contained little text, its graphics were still too crowded.

Later that year, I took those lessons into RIT's 3MT competition. I received feedback through RIT's Expressive Communication Center, rewrote my speech multiple times, removed jargon, simplified the slide, and became much more deliberate about gestures, expressions, pauses, pacing, emphasis, and movement. That preparation ultimately resulted in First Place at RIT's 2025 3MT competition for my presentation, No More Deadly Butterflies: Drone and AI Against Landmines.

When I returned to IGARSS in August 2026, preparation was considerably easier because the foundation was already there. During the live presentation, an unexpected projector arrangement caused me to partially block my slide at first, and realizing it briefly broke my concentration. Because I had internalized the presentation, I was able to recover, continue naturally, and ultimately receive both First Prize and the People's Choice Award.

My Four Main Tips for Preparing for 3MT

1. Learn and Understand

Before writing your speech, understand what 3MT is trying to accomplish. Read the rules and judging criteria. Watch previous winners and study different styles. Look at how presenters open, organize their stories, use the slide, and communicate with a non specialist audience.

Then understand your own purpose. What problem are you solving? Why does it matter? What are you doing about it? What have you found, or what do you hope to achieve? What could change because of your work? A useful starting sequence is Problem, Motivation, Approach, Results, and Impact, but it is only a starting point.

Learn from other presenters and follow useful guidance on speech structure, timing, slide design, and delivery, but do not treat any advice as a rigid formula. You know your research better than anyone else. Your presentation should still reflect your own research, voice, and communication style.

2. Write and Simplify

Start by writing the research story. Do not worry immediately about making every sentence fit perfectly into three minutes. Once the story is there, begin simplifying. Remove unnecessary technical detail and jargon, shorten complicated sentences, and write for speaking rather than for reading. A sentence that works in a journal article may sound unnatural when spoken aloud.

Also pay attention to writing techniques that make spoken language more memorable and give important ideas greater emphasis. One example is the rule of three, where three related words, phrases, or ideas are grouped together to create rhythm and emphasis. My friend Saif once pointed out that I use this pattern quite often in my speaking, even though I had not consciously known the name of the technique before. Techniques like this can help, but they should sound natural rather than forced.

The slide is also an important part of simplifying your message. One of my biggest lessons from IGARSS 2025 was that little text does not automatically mean a simple slide. Graphics can also become crowded. Keep the text minimal, make sure every visual has a clear purpose, and whenever possible, use meaningful images, illustrations, or simple graphics that help communicate your idea quickly. The audience should not have to choose between understanding your slide and listening to you. Your slide should support your story, not compete with it.

3. Rehearse and Refine

This is where a draft gradually becomes a presentation. Practice with people inside and outside your field, but also spend time rehearsing on your own. I used to practice repeatedly in my apartment, recording myself, watching the presentation back, making adjustments, and rehearsing again.

Do not simply ask, "Was it good?" Ask where you lost the listener, what they remembered, what was confusing, and what they thought your main message was. Pay attention to pace, pauses, gestures, expressions, volume, eye contact, and movement. Good practice is not only repetition. It is iteration: Practice, Observe, Adjust, Practice Again.

If possible, rehearse in the actual venue before the final competition. I practiced on the actual RIT stage, which helped me become familiar with the space and identify uncertainties that are easy to overlook at home. Where will the microphone be? Will it be handheld or fixed? How loudly do you need to speak? Where should you stand so you do not block the slide? How much room do you have to move? Many of these uncertainties can be resolved before competition day simply by practicing in the real environment.

4. Repeat and Internalize

Across my preparation for IGARSS 2025 and RIT's 3MT, I spent approximately five to six months developing and refining my approach. I did not practice for hours every weekday. Some days I rehearsed briefly, while on some weekends I spent much of the day working on it. I never counted the exact number of repetitions, but it was certainly more than 100 and quite possibly several hundred.

Eventually, repetition turns deliberate choices into habits. I prefer the word internalize rather than simply memorize. You should know the presentation so well that you are no longer spending most of your attention trying to remember the next sentence.

That frees you to communicate. You can look at the audience, control your pace, pause, gesture, change your expression, and react naturally. It also gives you a safety net when something unexpected happens. My projector experience at IGARSS 2026 reminded me exactly why this matters.

A Note About Nervousness and Anxiety

I still get nervous. In my opinion, some degree of nervousness before an important presentation is normal, even for very experienced speakers. People experience it differently. Your heartbeat may increase. Your legs may shake. You may fidget. Some people speak faster, some become quieter or louder, and others start walking around the stage more than usual.

For me, the strongest nervousness is usually before I begin. Once I walk onto the stage and start a presentation that I have rehearsed thoroughly, the anxiety begins to fade. Within the first few moments, my attention shifts from thinking about the audience to telling the story I have practiced so many times.

Preparation is one of the keys. If you are trying to remember a poorly rehearsed script while simultaneously managing the microphone, slide, timing, audience, gestures, and nervousness, the mental load becomes much greater. There will always be things you cannot control, but you can prepare yourself to handle them. Confidence, at least in my experience, does not mean entering the stage without feeling nervous. It means trusting your preparation enough to continue even while you are nervous.

Three Minutes Are Built Slowly

A strong three minute presentation does not appear overnight. It is built through writing, feedback, mistakes, rehearsal, and many small improvements.

What I learned preparing for IGARSS 2025 helped me at RIT. What I improved at RIT made returning to IGARSS in 2026 considerably easier. Those communication skills have also carried into other experiences, including delivering remarks as the Graduate Delegate for RIT's College of Science in May 2026. One period of hard work became the foundation for the next.

As you build those skills, remember that there is no single formula for a great 3MT. There are many useful resources, including official judging criteria, communication guidance, and presentations from previous participants. Use them, learn from them, but do not feel that you need to copy someone else's exact structure or delivery.

Research topics are different. Personalities are different. Voices are different. You may be a native or non native English speaker. You may already enjoy public speaking or be starting with almost no experience. Your starting point does not determine how well you can eventually communicate your research.

Public speaking and research communication are skills. Give yourself time to learn, rehearse, make mistakes, listen to feedback, and keep improving. At the same time, learn from others without trying to become them. Your own perspective, personality, and style can be part of what makes your presentation memorable.

The audience may eventually see only three minutes, but the skills you build preparing for those three minutes can last far beyond the competition.