My journey from lab to film festival: AKA move over Pixar! (Natasha Nagle)

    Image courtesy of Natasha Nagle

As researchers, we have a tendency to get buried in journals, or spend countless hours in the lab, hunched over computers. We’re trained to focus on the intricacies of our work, ensuring every detail is meticulously documented and every result is accurately reported. But there's another skill that's increasingly crucial: effectively communicating your research to others.

In fact, effective communication is one of the top skills that employers value. Just check out these posts at Indeed and LinkedIn highlighting communication as their most in-demand skill for 2024. It’s no longer enough to be an expert in your field; you must also be able to convey your ideas clearly and persuasively to a wide variety of audiences, not all of whom are familiar with your subject area.

Whether you're explaining your research to a non-specialist, pitching your ideas to potential collaborators, or presenting your findings at a conference, your ability to communicate can make or break your career, especially with more employers, universities, and grant-funding bodies considering communications and outreach work as crucial for jobs and funding.

But learning how to communicate effectively to a wide variety of audiences isn’t something that’s always built into traditional PhD or Masters by research programs. Luckily, at La Trobe, there are opportunities for you to get active experience in communicating your research while you’re still studying for your degree. One of these opportunities is the Visualise Your Thesis (VYT) competition which I entered (winning second place) last year and which resulted in my short video being chosen for screening at my very first film festival! <cue shocked Pikachu meme>

Let’s rewind to where it all started. In 2023, as a first-year PhD student, I decided to enter the University’s VYT competition. The task? To transform my dense, complex research into a snappy 60-second video that general audiences could understand. The outcome? Well, I think I already spoiled that ending.

The idea of condensing years of painstaking research into just one minute seemed overwhelming, intimidating and, at times, damn near impossible. I’d occasionally ventured into the realm of creating videos for school assignments before (usually to somewhat embarrassing results – no I will not show you that video for French class), but never with such stringent requirements or applied to such a large and complex topic. And because I’m a glutton for punishment, I decided it would be triply fun to animate my video, something I had absolutely no experience in, nor seemingly any means by which to do so (and if that’s not an indication I’m a true PhD student, I don’t know what is!)  

Communicating research can be difficult at times (as a geoarchaeologist, most people assume I spend my days staring intently at rocks and dirt), but the one truth that I found the most ease in was that I had to get to the beating heart of my research. What’s the one thing that truly matters? What drew me to this research and what can I see my audience being interested in, too?

For me, archaeology – and geoarchaeology, specifically — is all about the context it helps provide to us about archaeological sites, their ancient peoples, and what we can understand about how they lived. First year archaeology students learn that we can obtain all the artifacts we could ever want, but if we don’t know where they came from, why, and how, their usefulness can decline significantly outside of being really lovely paperweights, or worse – materials on the black market.

So, I started to think: “Without context, we have no archaeology. Without archaeology we wouldn’t know much about past peoples and their cultures. Without this knowledge we’d have to rely on spotty and often inaccurate written accounts to understand the past…and I think we all know how poorly that can go. So, context = key?” Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

And this beating heart proved interesting not only to me, but also the VYT judges and the film festival organisers who chose my work to be screened alongside 23 other incredible works from global artists.

This recognition opened new doors for me. It gave me the confidence to seek out other opportunities to present my research and further develop my communication skills; recently resulting in me winning my school’s 3MT (Three Minute Thesis) competition heat. It also highlighted the importance of storytelling in research and the power of visual communication.

Participating in the VYT competition taught me more than just how to create an animated video. It underscored the importance of clear and engaging communication in all aspects of professional life and just how quickly effective communication can result in tangible results, not just within academia, but also from those far outside your discipline.

And for those of you who have submitted your own VYT entries for 2024, remember that the skills and experiences you gain will be invaluable, not just for your research, but for your future career. You might even find yourself at a film festival, watching your work light up the big screen, or landing your dream job because you nailed the presentation. The journey may be challenging, but the rewards are definitely worth it.

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The 2024 La Trobe University 3MT Championship will be held on September 13.
The winner of this year's VYT competition will be announced as part of the event.
You can register to attend, and find our more, here.

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BIO: Having received her BS in Geosciences and BAs in Classics and Anthropology at Penn State, and her Masters in Archaeological Science at Cambridge, Natasha Nagle is now a PhD candidate at La Trobe, researching the ancient Damya Lake in the Northeastern Jordan Valley and how its environment could have affected peoples living at nearby archaeological sites. She is a great believer in researchers gaining the skills and confidence to communicate their own work in interesting and engaging ways, without having to sacrifice all their free-time or sanity to do so, and you can often find her curled up with tea and a good book or writing truly terrible (but funny) historically based poetry. 

She can be reached at: Natasha.Nagle@latrobe.edu.au