Carnegie Mellon University students participated in this year's Speak Up! Program, a five-part cross-disciplinary communication skills seminar for undergraduate summer researchers hosted by the Undergraduate Research Office. The program culminated in a July 13 event with public presentations modeled after the graduate-level Three Minute Thesis presentations.
Stephanie Wallach, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education and head of the Undergraduate Research Office, spearheaded the Speak Up! series in collaboration with Kevin Monahan, director of the Career and Professional Development Center; Necia Werner, associate teaching professor in the Department of English; Nisha Shanmugaraj, associate director of Global Communications Center; and Richelle Bernazzoli, assistant director of the Undergraduate Research Office.
"Speak Up! sessions ask students to consider how to tailor their messages to a broad range of audiences," Wallach said, "and to help students to think about adapting their resumes, their job conversations, their personal statements and their research presentations to these varied audiences and settings, from graduate school applications to job fairs."
The Speak Up! sessions included Module 1-Deliver your Novelty; Module 2-First Impressions: Communicating Your Research "Sound Bite"; Module 3-Storytelling: Narrating Your Professional Experience in Personal Statements; and Module 4-Resumes: Your Calling Card to the World.
Senior biology major Sophie Halpern took first place in the culminating Three Minute Research Presentation about her summer project on extracellular matrix polymers in Candida albicans biofilms with Associate Professor Fred Lanni and Professor Aaron Mitchell. She said she learned to treat her presentation as a conversation, and when describing her research on fungal infections, to "make it as casual as possible."
"[The program] set up very real-world scenarios that we can expect in our professional and personal lives when it comes to talking about our work," Halpern said.
Halpern, like most of this summer's Speak Up! students, participated in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. Undergraduates in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences Honors Fellowship Program and the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience in the College of Engineering also took part. Other university offices involved in Speak Up! included the Global Communications Center and the Career and Professional Development Center.