3MT Profile: Navid Sharifi

Navid Sharifi holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and was Concordia’s 3-Minute Thesis PhD Winner in 2013. We asked him why his 3MT experience was important to him and how he found the preparation process. For Navid, developing the communication skills for presenting PhD level work to a generalist audience was huge, and led to other professional opportunities. The coaching sessions helped foster these skills, along with gaining confidence through practice and peer learning exchanges.

Here’s Navid on his experience. "As graduate students in engineering, we learn how to present our research and findings to an audience comprised of academics, engineers and professionals. Although I think this is an essential skill for all graduate student to develop, it’s just not enough!" 

"During three coaching sessions and numerous email exchanges that continued to the very late hours of the night before the competition, I learned that many technical terms and phrases I was using so frequently in my presentations were completely unfamiliar to most people. I learned how to replace them with more common but less accurate equivalents. For example, instead of saying “the temperature of the plasma is around 14000 degrees”, I decided to say “the plasma is almost as hot as the surface of the sun!” This technique of adapting my speech to my audience was definetely my biggest takeaway."

The best part? “Winning the competition served as a source of inspiration to me. It was the spark that initiated a chain of success in my academic career. With the travel grant award I won, I traveled to South Korea to and presented my research, winning the best paper award at the conference.”

You can watch a video of Navid Sharifi’s 2013 presentation here.