MA students raced against the clock to explain their graduate work in three minutes during a College-wide competition.
How do you sum up months’ worth of work into three short minutes? Eight MA students from the College of Humanities managed this daunting task when they participated in the College’s annual Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition on February 29, 2024.
Every year, each college or school within BYU hosts a 3MT contest, which requires participants to explain their thesis in an engaging, three-minute oral presentation. Each student is allowed a single PowerPoint slide on which to base their remarks. The top three winners of the college-level competition receive prize money, and the first-place winner goes on to compete in the university-wide 3MT competition against representatives from different colleges.
For the College of Humanities competition this year, Professor Rob McFarland (European Reception of America), Associate Professor Jennifer Haraguchi (Early Modern Italy), and Associate Professor Joey Franklin (Creative Writing Pedagogy) served as judges. They rated student presentations based on comprehension, engagement, and communication.
Kateryna Kravchenko (Linguistics MA ’24) took home the first-place $1,000 prize with her thesis presentation “An Analysis of Ukrainians’ Language Attitudes and Ideology: A Conflict-catalyzed Identity Shift.” Kravchenko discussed the recent phenomenon occurring amongst Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Many of these speakers have opted to drop their Russian in favor of speaking only Ukrainian, and Kravchenko used sociolinguistic interviews to discover their primary motivations as well as the process of making the shift. Her research helps “highlight the process of language shift . . . [and provides] valuable insight into the changing dynamics of the Ukrainian society.” Kravchenko will participate in the university-wide 3MT competition at 11 a.m. in the BYU Varsity Theatre on March 21, 2024.
Jinuye “Amber” Li (SLaT MA ’25) took home the second-place $750 prize with her thesis presentation “Strengthening Connections: Air-Writing in Chinese Character Teaching.” Li discussed her work with elementary-aged Chinese language students in the UK—during her time volunteering there as a Chinese teacher, she developed a teaching system called “air-writing” that uses hand gestures to practice writing characters in the air. Li’s research involved performing a learning experiment that tested out the effectiveness of air-writing on children’s learning. She found that, when using the air-writing method, their quiz and assessment scores went up. They also engaged more attentively, which helped with classroom management. Li recommends this simple technique for the classroom because it “helps learners strengthen the connection between the form and meaning of characters.”
Nicole Francis (Comparative Studies MA ’25) took home the third-place $500 prize with her thesis presentation “The Least of the Apostles.” Francis discussed historical understanding of the Apostle Paul. Much of the evidence for previous theories about his life has been drawn from secondhand accounts, but Francis emphasized the important resource of Paul’s autobiographical passages in the Bible. For example, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul refers to himself as “the least of the apostles.” Francis’s research uses this and other passages to ponder deep questions (like “What does it do for us as a faith community to acknowledge that one of the greatest advocates for Jesus fundamentally hated himself?”) and to give space for true exploration of “the messy, insecure, yet moving figure that was the Apostle Paul.”
Other student presenters included:
Xana Furtado (Portuguese MA ’24): “Lessening Lacunas: Unearthing Female Indigenous Characters in Maria Firmina dos Reis’s ‘Gupeva’”
Isaac Richards (English MA ’24): “Objects and Museal Rhetoric”
Rebekah Geddes (Spanish MA ’24): “A Corpus Study of the Effects of Information Packaging on the Position of Select Spanish Time Adverbs in the Spanish Verb Phrase”
Kylie Woffinden (TESOL MA ’24): “Perceptions of TESOL Instruction from Varying Feedback Sources”
Janaya Tanner (Creative Writing MA ’24): “Rediscovering Motherhood in Science Fiction”
Read about the 2023 College of Humanities 3MT winners.
