Inki Sul, a Management Science PhD student, won the 2020 Three-Minute Dissertation Competition for doctoral candidates nearing graduation.

An annual exercise that became a contest in 2018, the competition is designed to hone communications skills and make the complex research of students in the Jindal School’s PhD programs more accessible to prospective employers and general audiences. Modeled in part on the Three Minute Thesis (3MT), an academic research communication competition developed by The University of Queensland, Australia, the competition forces scholars to think about ways to distill years of research in such a way as to make it readily understood by a general audience.

“It’s a great idea,” said Sul, who is enrolled in the Management Science Operations Management Concentration. “It helps us wrap our heads around ourselves and think about what we’ve been doing. In the end, this research needs to be communicated to the mass crowd — that’s the goal — and I think it was a great opportunity for me personally to think about how my research should be communicated, what the interesting points are and how it relates to the world in general.”

Dr. Sumit Sarkar, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair, a professor in the Information Systems Area at the Jindal School and director of the school’s PhD programs, created the competition and said one of his primary goals is to produce graduates who are sought after in academia and industry.

Sarkar began requiring that students be recorded doing their elevator speeches — clear, concise summaries that are easily understood and quickly delivered — in videos that are roughly three minutes long. This year, with social-distancing requirements in place, the students had to figure out a way to record themselves. (View Sul’s winning video at https://youtu.be/3-6S21aoPsw.)

“Once the students see themselves in this video, it makes them realize how they are coming across,” Sarkar said.

Other top finishers in the 2020 competition were Finance Concentration student David Heidtman in second place and Accounting Concentration student Gurvinder Sandhu in third place.

Sul, Heidtman and Sandhu were awarded cash prizes of $500, $300 and $200, respectively.