Nutshell Talks at VT NSF Conference Allow Student Researchers to Practice New Skills
December 12, 2022
Ten graduate students from across the United States delivered short and engaging research talks as part of a “mini Nutshell Games” event at the annual meeting of National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Traineeship (NRT) programs, this year hosted by Virginia Tech October 17-October 19.
The NRT Nutshell Talks were the culmination of a 7-week Communicating Research workshop series developed and taught by Virginia Tech’s Center for Communicating Science director Patty Raun. The Nutshell Talks evening was based on the center’s annual graduate student competition, the Nutshell Games, in which student presenters have only 90 seconds to explain their research to a public audience. In the NRT conference version, student talks were approximately 3 minutes.
Twenty graduate student researchers from funded NRTs across the country were selected in August from a pool of 80 applicants to participate in the Communicating Research program. Students participated in weekly 3-hour online interactive sessions with Raun between August 30 and October 18, with an in-person dress rehearsal for the ten Nutshell presenters at the conference venue.
In addition, Raun provided a 90-minute in-person workshop for 90 graduate student participants at the conference, “Building bridges for collaboration: a participatory student workshop in communicating science.” Center associate director Carrie Kroehler facilitated a conference workshop for graduate student online participants, “Communicating research: an introduction to improvisation for scientists.”
The Nutshell Talks were an integral part of the NRT conference, which brings together principal investigators and graduate students from NSF-funded NRTs to build networks and share best practices in interdisciplinary graduate education. This year’s meeting at Virginia Tech, the largest NRT annual meeting to date and the first to be held in hybrid format, included 246 participants who traveled to campus and another 200 online participants.
The Nutshell Talks allowed conference attendees to learn about ten NRT research areas and provided the student presenters with an opportunity to communicate their research.
“Giving the nutshell talk. . .put into practice what we were taught,” commented one student presenter. “It was wonderful to see how effective the new techniques we were taught [were] at engaging the audience.”
Raun’s focus in the pre-conference workshop series, as in all the work of the Center for Communicating Science, was to help researchers learn to make their communication more personal, direct, spontaneous, responsive, and emotionally vivid. Participants developed storytelling skills, roleplayed different audience types for one another, and worked to distill their research into short, engaging talks.
“The nutshell talks [were] the first time I have ever felt happy with a presentation I’ve given!” said another presenter. “The practice opportunities, particularly the exercises around re-framing the talk from different perspectives, were very effective tools for preparation.”
According to the National Science Foundation website, the NRT program “seeks proposals that explore ways for graduate students in research-based master’s and doctoral degree programs to develop the skills, knowledge, and competencies needed to pursue a range of STEM careers. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas, through a comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.” The program’s commitment to enhancing the communication skills of graduate students was a driving force in the conference partnership with the Center for Communicating Science.
This year’s NRT meeting was hosted by Virginia Tech’s Disaster Resilience and Risk Management (DRRM) program, which is directed by Robert Weiss and supported by NRT funding. The conference team included Marie Paretti, education director of the DRRM program; Sharon Stacy, program coordinator for the Center for Coastal Studies; and engineering graduate students Maya Menon and Qualla Ketchum.
Other institutions represented in the Communicating Research student group included North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the University of Akron, the University of Illinois, the Ohio State University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Irvine.