FEATURE
College of Graduate Studies
By Julia Halprin Jackson
Grad Slam Takes Center Stage
San José State’s Grad Slam competition offers graduate students of all disciplines comprehensive training in how to persuasively present their work.
Picture this: The curtain opens at San José State University’s Hammer Theatre to reveal a blue and white banner that reads “Grad Slam: SJSU’s Brightest Minds Tackle the World’s Toughest Problems in 3 Minutes or Less.” An LED screen lowers from above the stage — the important mechanism that helps competitors communicate their research in a single visual slide. In that half-second before the event kicks off, the space transforms from a performance showspace into a TedX-style presentation showcase.
This spring, the College of Graduate Studies will host the fifth annual Grad Slam, and the third at the Hammer Theatre. The event, which is co-chaired by Cheryl Cowan, senior associate for graduate project development, and Amy Russo, coordinator of writing and communication support for multilingual and graduate students, offers so much more than its cash prizes. Participating graduate students receive personalized coaching and feedback and are eligible for a comprehensive four-week training program that covers everything from summarizing technical material for a general audience to owning one’s presence onstage.
Every winter, the Grad Slam committee reviews dozens of research abstracts and applications and trains semifinalists to create three-minute videos of their presentation. This year, they received more than double the number of abstracts as the previous year, and of them 35 students were selected as semifinalists. Cowan expects application numbers to grow each year.
Watch Dean Marc d'Alarcao as he talks about the value of explaining your research to others, and Grad Slam participants themselves discussing their experiences. Video courtesy of SJSU College of Graduate Studies.
Ten finalists move on to present in-person at the culminating event during Research Week on campus. A panel of expert judges scores the presentations and offers first and second prizes, while audience members elect the Audience Choice award winner. Eligible winners are then invited to participate in the California State University system-wide research competition — a concept inspired by the SJSU Grad Slam and originated here in San José. The 2023 winner, Jaedyn Rollins, ’22 BS, ’24 MS Biological Sciences, went on to win the CSU Grad Slam a few weeks later.
“Public speaking is a scary thing; it is the most shared human fear, beyond death,” says Russo. “You can have the best ideas in the world, but if you can’t explain them in such a way that people will both understand you and find it persuasive, you’re going to lose your impact and your power when you don’t have to. College is really good at teaching people to talk to people in their same disciplines, but when you start working and join industry, nonprofits, government or wherever you go, you most likely are going to be working with someone with a different set of expertise and skills than you do.”
She adds that Grad Slam is not a research competition; it is a research communication competition. Take, for example, 2021 Grad Slam winner Holt Hanley, ’21 MS Meteorology. Hanley’s presentation, “Estimating the Key Drivers of Wildfire Using Artificial Neural Networks,” demonstrated how he and his collaborators at the Wildlife Interdisciplinary Research Center “taught computers to think like humans” in order to predict wildfire behavior. Holt, now a broadcast meteorologist for KSBW-8 TV, says that the skills he learned while preparing for Grad Slam come in handy every day.
“What I do every single day actually ties back to Grad Slam,” he says. Instead of distilling a year of research and condensing it in three minutes, he takes “two hours of research where I am looking at all the different maps and then I condense it down into three minutes. I literally use the same story structures that Amy taught me for this competition in my forecasting every day.”
Speech language pathologist Peace Lu (left, with Marc d'Alarcao) won the 2023 Audience Choice Award for her Grad Slam presentation. Photo by David Schmitz.
A few months after she won the Audience Choice Award for her presentation on multilingual stuttering at the 2023 Grad Slam, Peace Lu, ’23 MS Speech Language Pathology, began applying some of her newly acquired presentation skills as a speech language pathologist fellow at Generations Healthcare, an in-patient residential facility for senior citizens.
“After being in the field for a while, you start to forget which words you use are jargon, and which words most people might understand,” Lu says. “Grad Slam was a really, really good opportunity for me to practice presenting things in ways that were much easier to understand, not only in terms of my vocabulary, but in terms of the framework in which I’m presenting it.”
Cowan agrees that Grad Slam training is beneficial for participants regardless of whether they place, pursue additional degrees or apply their skills in industry.
“The value of the Grad Slam is not just in winning it,” she says. “The value of the Grad Slam is the participation process. Because of what you get out of it, you’re a winner whether or not you place. The students who participate are changemakers. These are the people who are going to be achieving great things, and they get to grow together as a group.”
“If you cannot communicate your ideas, then the ideas will never see the light of day,” says Marc d’Alarcao, dean of the College of Graduate Studies. “It’s not enough to have your ideas hidden in a research paper in a library somewhere. You have to get it out to the public so that people understand the value of the research that’s going on. And so we’re developing activities like the Grad Slam as a way of helping students achieve that skillset.”
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Top photo: Grad Slam second place winner Hoang-Vi Vu with emcee Holt Hanley/Photo by David Schmitz.
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