One of the most essential parts of science is communication. Begin able to eloquently communicate your research, your motivations for pursuing research, and to do so with confidently and comfortably with different audiences is a skill itself and deserves practice. Personally, I think there are three different “versions” of a prepared research talk that are useful to practice: the elevator pitch, a longer research description, and a research motivations and goals talk. Before we talk about those, we need to first talk about the crucial part of any conversation about science – knowing your audience.
Know you audience
Knowing your audience is a crucial part of any form of communication, and science communication is no different. The specific foci and things you choose to highlight will differ if you’re talking to a policymaker versus a family member versus a tenured PI. For most “elevator pitches”, your audience will be either faculty/colleagues, or lay public. For other versions of the prepared research talk, most of your audience members will be those involved in science, either in your field or adjacent areas. Regardless, there are a few universal considerations that you should consider regardless of the audience.
Number talk
When you’re introducing numbers or statistics (which is very useful for supporting your findings or motivations of your work), there are a few tricks you can use with your phrasing to improve your communication and impact. First, avoid using probabilities and stick to natural frequencies (i.e. instead of saying “the probability of getting X disease is 1%”, say “1 in 100 people get X disease). Second, avoid anchoring results in statistical significance, as this can be challenging conceptually depending on your audience. Instead of saying your p-value, talk about the magnitude of the effect size, again using a natural frequency if possible.
Avoid jargon
While field specific terms and jargon are useful shorthand for communicating quickly with our colleagues, they can be unknown and misunderstood when talking with people outside of our discipline. When you’re constructing your talk, try to replace more scientific terms with ones of the same meaning (e.g. “low oxygen” instead of “hypoxic”, “DNA damaging” instead of “mutagenic”) to improve clarity and understanding.
The elevator pitch
Even though it’s called an elevator pitch, this will be the most useful talk to prepare, and will come in handy at conferences, meetings, or simply describing the gist of your research to your peers or colleagues. As stated above, you first need to frame your work around the question of What is the “big problem”: Contextualize the issue that you are studying. It is best to start quite broad. If your research is related to disease or illness, start by describing the frequency, overall survival, or other important statistics about the disease itself. If your research is focused on basic science, focus instead on the limitation in knowledge you are trying to solve, or other motivations for pursuing the research. For the introductory sentence, it’s important to frame the core problem of your research with as wide of a lens as possible. “X disease is bad and impacts Y amount of people”. “X is a large issue in biology and furthering our understanding will help us to do Y”.
After we’ve introduced the “big problem”, you can start your descent from large to small(er). As you’re transitioning from the “big problem” to your specific research topic, you want to start to reduce the scope and scale of the problem to one that you can realistically solve, all while anchoring the specific work that you do into the larger issue you introduced. Some ways to do this are to a transitional word or phrase, such as “in particular, X is a bad problem because …”, or to talk about the specific result of the big issue, such as “X is bad because it can cause your specific outcome/research focus”. This can come at the tail end of the introduction of the “big problem”, or in a following sentence.
Now that you’ve narrowed the focus to the specific work that you are doing, it’s time to talk about it! Get more specific about how the work you’re doing right now is working to solve a defined problem that is connected to the “big problem”. After defining and describing the current work, it’s time to move into larger, grander goals. If your current work succeeds, what are you hoping to do next? How will a positive or negative result of your work impact our understanding of the “big problem” at large? Just as you went from large -> small when transitioning from the “big problem” to your specific research, in the tail end of the elevator pitch it’s time to go from small -> large, as you talk about the potential impact of the work (while also trying to not overstate it).
Variations on a theme of elevator pitch
Although we know that context and audience is key, changes in your audience can also change the structure and time that you spend in individual areas of your elevator pitch. If you’re talking to someone in your specific field or subdiscipline, you can skip over a lot of the more general background, as you have a common point of familiarity with your listener, and it would be redundant. In turn, this will give you the opportunity to expand on specific topics or go into greater depth with your experimental design, current results, or future directions. The need to avoid specific words or jargon is also lessened since you have a shared language within your subfield, although specific terms or abbreviations should still be introduced to ensure common understanding.
The “longer research description”
In addition to a version of your elevator pitch with an abbreviated background when talking with someone who has a common background or area of focus, there is a version which I think of as the “longer research description”. As the name implies, this is a longer talk, usually 5-10 minutes, and useful when describing your interest to someone in an interview context, or during a longer conversation at a conference. If the shape of an elevator pitch is an hourglass (big idea -> small, solvable problem -> big future directions), the “longer research description” is essentially just an elongated hourglass. During this, you can both expand the background portion of your elevator pitch, and weave in work that your lab/research group has previously done to further contextualize your current work and show how your current work is the natural “next step” of the previous work. This has a dual function of building legitimacy with your audience of both your current pursuit (as it’s the logical next step) as well as the work of your research group/lab. The actual description of the work itself can be more in depth as well, focusing on nuances or issues that may be obscured or not focused on in a shorter elevator pitch. In an interview context, this can help to show your ingenuity and ability to solve problems as they appear in research, which is a fundamental skill that is needed to be a good researcher. The future directions of the work can be similarly lengthened and can also provide an opportunity to discuss some of these future ideas with a colleague or potential collaborator.
The research motivations and goals talk
While we’ve spent the time thus far talking about the structure of an elevator pitch, which is designed to communicate and contextualize your research in a digestible and approachable manner, the research motivations and goals talk is less structured and designed to communicate your personal goals and ambitions with research (and medicine). This is a talk to answer the question of “What do you see yourself doing in a career as an MD/PhD?” Because this is a personal question, there isn’t a correct/incorrect answer to this question, but there still are essential components that you should communicate when discussing this topic. Key to this is why you need an MD/PhD to do what you want to do. Oh you want to do research? Why not just get a PhD then? You want to practice medicine and do clinical trials? What’s the need to get a PhD then? To me, the key component of getting a PhD is the process of investigation and learning how to think and approach problems like a scientist. This is a unique skillset that takes time and mentorship to develop well, and doing so will allow you to gain true expertise in a field and guide investigations into scientific and clinical problems. In your answer, you need to balance out the desires to get both degrees, emphasizing the need of clinical practice alongside scientific investigation. How will you integrate both research and medicine into your career? What balance between clinical and research responsibilities do you hope to have? What specific experiences motivated you to pursue an MD/PhD? Having answers to these questions will both help you structure an answer to these questions for interviews or applications, but also provide a genuine chance to reflect on your personal motivations for pursuing this degree pathway.