Seniors boil down months of research into a 3-minute thesis pitch
College seniors spend months researching and writing their senior theses, becoming experts on niche topics in a broad range of fields, from physics to philosophy. Those who enter the Pitch Your Thesis Competition, held by the Harvard College Writing Center, distill those hours of work and hundreds of pages of analysis into a digestible, three-minute oral presentation. Unlike last year’s inaugural event on campus, the 2020 Pitch Your Thesis Competition was a digital affair. Entrants each sent in a video presentation for judging, explaining their thesis topic and findings. The presentations, much like they would have been in person, were required to be logical, succinct, and without excessive jargon or unexplained terminology. Hakeem Angulu ’20, a joint concentrator in computer science and statistics, won first prize for the video explaining his thesis, “The Voting Power Gap: Identifying Racial Gerrymandering with a Discrete Voter Model.” Second place went to Kelsey Ichikawa ’20, a...