The PhD continues on though it has been in a slightly different form since March and the Covid-19 global pandemic resulted in social distancing measures. Over the past few months we have been off-campus, with the library closed and many public places where we used to study unavailable. Conferences have been postponed, canceled, or moved to a virtual setting. Deadlines have been shifted, working hours have changed, and sleep schedules are all over the place. Yet we persevere. As my supervisor, Dr. Hazel Hall, has told me many times, "What is important is keeping yourself safe, keeping your family safe, and not having a mental breakdown. Work comes after all of those things." I have been working over the summer. Perhaps not as efficiently as I wanted, but at my own pace and within the abilities of the day. As summer comes to a close and we begin to adjust to an academic year in a "new normal", however, I have more opportunities to participate in career and research training sessions (virtual though they may be).
This past week I undertook a training for developing an elevator pitch for my doctoral research 'The Effect of Culture on Public Library Use in New-Comer Populations'. This training came at an opportune time for me, as I have three separate conferences I'll be attending (two virtual, one currently in person) this fall. The elevator pitch is not unique to academics. The elevator pitch - also known as an elevator speech - is found in business, publishing, and pretty much any field where a person tries to convince someone else that their idea is important/relevant/worth buying. The elevator pitch is meant to be short, which means distilling a lot of information into a limited time-frame. Depending on the training, and the elevator ride you take, an elevator pitch can be anything between 5 seconds - one floor journey - to 3 minutes - I'm not sure how many floors this is, but this seems to be the limit of what is called an elevator pitch. In the training I attended our elevator pitches were meant to be 3 minutes or less. Depending on who you speak to, or what article you read, 3 minutes is too long for an elevator pitch. Even so, 3 minutes is not a large amount of time to explain a thesis that is meant to be about 80,000 words at completion. I've needed to develop my own elevator speech for a while but I also wasn't sure where to start, so the training this week was a bit of serendipity for me. One of my favourite strategies that was shared for how to develop your elevator pitch was to use an analogy. This analogy can be from the media (e.g. TV shows, the radio, movies), well-known stories, games, books, and potentially even memes. The major qualifier for the analogy you choose is that it needs to be something people inside and outside of your field will know about. It also needs to be popular enough that people from a different geographic area will know about it as well. By using an analogy, you are able to take the complex concepts and the jargon of your thesis and translate it into something many people will understand. Case in point, my analogy is based on the Disney film The Little Mermaid. An important part of using such an analogy is making sure the analogy is present throughout the elevator pitch. I don't start of talking about Ariel, the little mermaid, and then drop her as soon as I finish the first sentence. I continue to use the story that people know as a guiding path for the entire elevator pitch. My elevator pitch at the moment is a little less than 90 seconds. Depending on my audience, I can add more detail in some parts. Depending on my time, I may cut detail. But I now have something to work off of, even if there are additional tweaks to make. Though I struggled at first with finding an appropriate analogy, I'm happy with the one I ended up using. I am, after all, a big Disney fan. If your interested in my elevator pitch, or have thoughts on developing an elevator pitch, leave them down in the comments below. And odds are that if you see me at a conference, you'll get to hear the pitch yourself. Happy Reading!
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A Second Blog Page?This is the part of the blog specifically about my PhD. It will include updates, musings, and advice. Archives
August 2022
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