The Three-Minute Version of Your Work

"What do you work on?" is the most frequently asked question in academic life and the one people answer worst. The usual answer is either a job title, a topic so broad it says nothing, or four minutes of unstructured detail.

Preparing an answer takes an hour and it pays back at every conference, every meeting, every family gathering and every job interview. For a concrete operational example of how a workplace tool approaches a related coordination problem, see the website.

Prepare three lengths

Because the question comes in different forms.

Ten seconds, for the person who asked politely and is deciding whether to ask more. One sentence: the thing you study, in ordinary words.

Thirty seconds, for someone in an adjacent field or a genuinely interested non-specialist. Question, why it is interesting, what you found.

Three minutes, for someone in your field, or for someone who asked a follow-up. The same structure, developed, with a concrete example.

Practise each aloud. They are different pieces, not one thing truncated, and the short ones are harder.

The structure

Same shape at every length.

The question, in plain language. Not the field, not the method — the thing you want to find out.

Why it is open. One clause. What makes it a question rather than something already settled.

What you did or are doing.

What you found, if you have found something.

A concrete example, at the longer lengths. One case, one situation, one number. This is what people remember and it is the part most often left out.

The ten-second version

Hardest, and worth the most.

Test: could a bright person outside academia repeat it back? If not, it is too technical.

Avoid your field's jargon entirely. Not simplified — replaced. Every term of art you use spends attention you need.

Do not lead with the method. "I use a regression discontinuity design" answers a question nobody asked.

Do not lead with the discipline. "I'm a behavioural economist" is a category, not an answer, and it usually produces a polite nod and a change of subject.

Do lead with the thing itself. "I study why people keep paying for subscriptions they never use" gets a follow-up question, reliably.

Where it is used

Conferences, constantly — at coffee, at posters, at dinner.

Poster sessions, where the thirty-second version is the entire format. See posters.

Job interviews, including the meetings around the talk. See the job market talk.

Meeting a potential collaborator, where the quality of the short version determines whether a conversation happens.

Talking to funders, journalists, policymakers and administrators.

And with family, where the failure to have one produces years of relatives who do not know what you do.

What goes wrong

Starting with background. Three sentences of context before anything specific, by which point attention is gone.

Answering a different question. Being asked what you work on and answering what your department does, or what your grant is about.

Being so general that it is empty. "I work on decision-making" tells the listener nothing and invites no question.

Being so specific that it is opaque. The full title of your third paper.

Undercutting it. "It's quite niche" or "it's probably boring" — said from modesty, heard as a reason to stop listening.

Not stopping. The three-minute version delivered to someone who asked for ten seconds.

The test

Say it to someone outside your field and ask them to repeat it back.

Whatever they get wrong is what to fix. Whatever they ask about next is what people find interesting, which is frequently not what you expected.

Do this with three different people. The pattern in what they ask is the most useful information available about how to describe your work.

Keeping it current

It goes stale. The answer that fitted your thesis does not fit the work you are doing three years later, and people update it much later than they should.

Revisit it when your work shifts, and specifically before any event where you will be asked repeatedly.

Have a version for the project you want to be doing, not only the one you are finishing. What you say you work on shapes what people bring to you.

The short version

Prepare three lengths — ten seconds, thirty seconds, three minutes — and practise them aloud.

Lead with the thing itself, in plain words. Not the field, not the method.

Include one concrete example at the longer lengths; it is what people remember.

Test it on someone outside your field, and fix whatever they get wrong.

And never undercut it. The apology is heard, the work is not.

For an independent authoritative reference, consult the MIT Communication Lab for academic communication guidance.