February 09, 2015

In our digital-driven world, young scientists need to build skills for presenting their research online. Sigma Xi runs the Student Research Showcase to prepare them. The showcase is an online presentation competition that will be held March 23–29, 2015. Students prepare websites with a personal video, written abstract, and technical slideshow about their research. They compete in graduate, undergraduate, and high school divisions and the top presentation in each group wins a prize of up to $500. 

The deadline to register and submit presentations is March 16. Students do not need to be Sigma Xi members to participate, but everyone must submit a preliminary abstract for preapproval. 

Sigma Xi caught up with last year’s graduate division winner, Kathryn Peiman, to get her advice for this year’s participants.

What advice would you give to students who are thinking about participating in the showcase this year?
Do it. It’s a really good experience. Not only is it something nice to have in your CV, but just the practice to be able to think about your project, both in a small and large scale, to present it in what are really three quite different mediums. The personal video is something that, as a scientist, you don’t get a chance to do that often and social media is so important nowadays that those types of interactions are going to become even more important. The abstract: just practicing writing and conveying the important points. And then the technical slideshow, that’s usually how we present things at conferences, lab meetings. So all of these methods of communicating are really important.

What was involved in the process of putting together your presentation?
Going through a lot of pictures. [Competition in birds] is obviously a very visual medium to present and so I had to get material together, both pictures and video that I had taken in the field … One of the tricks is to remember to actually take photos and videos, especially of you doing these things, just to show other people what you’re actually doing. 

What were the main points that you wanted to get across in your personal video?
My goal with the video was to put [my research] in a much bigger picture. The slideshow and stuff, that’s for the details. The [video] I was viewing as showing people why I was excited about what I was doing. So it’s me talking, and hopefully conveying, that I was really excited to do this and that I think it’s the coolest thing in the world … One of my goals is to link it to something they might have experienced before, link it to things that they can see on a day-to-day basis and they don’t have to go to my specific study site in the Bahamas and see this bird to be able to actually understand what it is that I’m interested in. 

What did you think about the type or the amount of feedback that you got from judges?
That was actually one of the coolest things about this is that I got a lot of really good feedback. Some of it was things that I had forgotten to include that was a “my bad” kind of thing. Other ones were things that I had been thinking about and it was great to just have a discussion with the judges … it was more of a back-and-forth and it was really nice to have all those people reading and thinking about what I was doing.

Volunteer as a Judge

Sigma Xi members are encouraged to volunteer to judge the Student Research Showcase. If you are a member, please email meetings@sigmaxi.org by March 16 with the subject line “Showcase Competition Judge” for more information.

Judging sections include: 
• Behavioral Sciences
• Biochemistry
• Cellular & Molecular Biology
• Chemistry
• Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
• Engineering
• Environmental Sciences
• Geosciences
• Math & Computer Science
• Physics & Astronomy
• Physiology & Immunology
• Social Sciences

For more information on the showcase, visit www.sigmaxi.org/student-research-showcase. Sigma Xi will host Google Hangouts about science communication to help students prepare their presentation sites. Click here to watch the full interview with Kathryn Peiman. This article was originally published in the March-April issue of Sigma Xi Today.