Texas A&M at Qatar students win top prizes at national 3MT competition
Published Sep 04, 2022
Zurwa Khan and Jack Altwal, graduate students at Texas A&M University at Qatar, won first and second place respectively, at the national three-minute thesis (3MT) competition that was hosted by Qatar University recently.
The 3MT Competition is an academic competition that challenges Masters and Ph.D. students to describe their research within three minutes. It celebrates the discoveries made by graduate students and encourages them to communicate the importance of their research to the broader community.
Khan said, “Experiencing the National 3MT has been of monumental importance to me. We met and shared our research with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and institutions. The competition bought together graduate students from all over Qatar and was a successful step towards fostering a graduate culture within Qatar. Special thanks to my research supervisors for the technical support, the Graduate Student Association and the Center for Teaching & Learning at Texas A&M at Qatar for organizing and supporting us at the university level 3MT, and the Qatar University Graduate Learning Support team for organizing the national event and for the extensive coaching they gave us.”
Altwal said, “The university level event we had at Texas A&M at Qatar earlier in the year was a great training ground to prepare us for the national level competition. With a lot of practice, I was able to adapt and enhance the script and slide that I used earlier for a wider audience. I made it more dynamic, simplified the language and added snippets of humor to make an otherwise highly technical subject relatable and entertaining to the audience.”
In his speech on the occasion, Dr. Hassan Rashid Al-Derham, President of Qatar University, said: “Today we meet with you at Qatar University at this national competition. We are pleased to host all the participants from various educational institutions in Qatar alongside Qatar University students in this competition. We are always happy to work with these educational institutions for one goal, which is to achieve Qatar National Vision 2030.”
He added, "This competition is intended to explore and draw eminent students from graduate studies and scientific research, to recognize their potential, and to hone their inductive skills as our partners in Qatar work to develop solutions to the problems,”
The jury for this year’s national competition included Dr. Abdullatif Al-Khal, Deputy Chief Medical Officer and Director of the Department of Medical Education at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), Dr. Samer Adham, Director of the Scientific Center for Water Sustainability - Conocophilips Qatar, Ibtisam Al-Mannai, Executive Director of Finance and Hanan Al-Emadi, Qatari broadcaster.
The official sponsor of the competition was ConocoPhillips Qatar.