BUJUMBURA May 30th (ABP) – The University Agency of the Francophone Community, in collaboration with the Graduate School of the University of Burundi and the Embassy of France in Burundi, organized on Wednesday in Bujumbura, the final phase of the competition called “my thesis in 180 seconds”. Among the participants in that activity were the Deputy Counselor for Cooperation and Cultural Action at the French Embassy in Burundi, Mr. Christophe Reilhac and the Deputy Director of the Graduate School of the University of Burundi, Prof. Dieudonné Gahungu and a general public, a check on the site by ABP has revealed.
The competition “my thesis in 180 seconds – MT180” is an event that takes place on stage and in front of an audience and aims to present research work orally, in a language accessible to the general public, in 3 minutes. This activity has many advantages, including the promotion and popularization of research, the improvement of the communication capacity of graduate students and the direct contact of the researcher with the public. It also allows researchers to make the public understand and popularize research themes.
According to Mr. Alexis Kwontche, Head of the AUF in Burundi, this kind of competition, which has existed since 2012 in Quebec, was inspired by the English-speaking equivalent “Three-minute thesis” which took place for the first time in 2008 at the University of Queensland in Australia.
The head of the AUF in Burundi had to specify that this competition, which has just been organized for the first time in Burundi, counts for the pilot phase or “zero edition” instead of the “one” phase because, he said, it is not going to result in a winner who is going to compete in an international final.
Nevertheless, he said, the next edition which will be organized in 2023 “edition 1”, will be able to determine a winner who, with the support of the AUF will participate in the international equivalent of the competition which is organized every year.
Out of 21 students from the graduate school of the University of Burundi who had expressed their interest in participating in that academic activity, 12 were pre-selected by the graduate school, ten competed in the semi-finals and eight competed in the final. In the end, four of them stood out and won prizes, including Fiacre Muhimpundu for the grand jury prize and Mrs. Irène Irakoze for the public prize.
Fiacre Muhimpundu, student of the 2nd cohort at the graduate school of the University of Burundi told the press that this activity is of great importance: “I am happy to have explained to the public the object of my study and who even appreciated it positively. This competition allows any student to come back to the object of their study because after two or three years working on a subject it can even happen to the graduate student to confuse the results, the data, because it is a bit too much”.
The thesis topics that were presented during this competition relate, among other things, to “optimal modeling of the stochastic effects of data from the tax revenue panel of the DRC”, “eco-climatic change and evolution of malaria in Burundi: implication for the vector control”; “modeling of risk exposure in the banking sector”, “Analysis of the retroactive capacity of taxpayers following communication: issue of State accountability”, “Analysis of media coverage of economic issues in Burundi: case of agriculture” and “Development of a predictive model of poverty in Burundi by a Monte Carlo algorithm”.