Three Minutes to Make it Matter: Inside CGU's 2026 Big Pitch Competition  | Claremont Graduate University

Three Minutes to Make it Matter: Inside CGU's 2026 Big Pitch Competition  | Claremont Graduate University
March 19, 2026
Three Minutes to Make it Matter: Inside CGU’s 2026 Big Pitch Competition
Three minutes is not a lot of time. It’s enough to make a cup of coffee, scroll through a few emails, or lose the attention of an audience entirely. It is, apparently, also enough time to change how someone thinks about your life’s work if you do it right.
That’s the challenge at the heart of The Big Pitch, Claremont Graduate University’s annual version of the Three-Minute Thesis competition, where graduate students from across disciplines face down a timer and an audience that has likely never given their research a moment’s thought, armed with nothing more than a single slide.
What began in 2008 as a small competition at the University of Queensland to help graduate students learn how to discuss their research has since spread to more than 900 universities across 85 countries. CGU’s iteration, now in its sixth year, is open to graduate students at any stage and from any department. It’s a kind of live laboratory where scholarship meets storytelling, and where communicating your ideas turns out to matter just as much as the ideas themselves. Participants submit pre-recorded pitches in a preliminary round; the top six advance to the live finals, judged by a panel of faculty, staff, and alumni. The audience picks their own winner by poll.
This year’s finals took place on February 27, with first place carrying a $1,500 prize. But most participants admit that the competition is about much more than the monetary award. It’s about taking years of specialized research and work and learning how to make it land for the person standing next to you in an elevator, across from you at dinner, or hopefully, someday, across from you at a grant committee meeting.
This year’s winners came from different disciplines and different corners of lived experiences. The clock was the only thing they had in common. What each of them did with it was entirely their own.
“That day I was just focused on telling my story, pouring my heart into it, and hoping that it would resonate.” — Emily Zavala, The Big Pitch first-place winner.
For first-place winner Emily Zavala, it started by inviting the audience into a nightmare scenario: waking up in the middle of the night to hear an intruder in your home. “For 16 years, I was the voice on the other end of that call,” she said. A seventh-year PhD scholar in Positive Organizational Psychology, Zavala argued that the decisions dispatchers make — under stress, with incomplete information, in a matter of seconds — have been almost entirely overlooked by researchers. Her pitch,
Before the Sirens
, examined how emotion shapes risk appraisal in 911 calls, and what that means for training, response time, and the officers who arrive on scene.
What made her pitch land wasn’t just the research, but the honesty behind it. Zavala had competed in The Big Pitch the year before, where she was an Audience’s Choice winner. This time she came back with a clearer sense of what had been missing. “I went back and watched previous Big Pitch recordings, especially the winners, and focused on how they connected their research to something meaningful,” she said. “That’s when it clicked for me that I needed to ground my work in ‘why’ it matters to me.”
The why, for Zavala, was never abstract. It was the pattern of calls she still thinks about — people scared, uncertain, waiting for help — and the questions that followed her home. “Those moments stayed with me. I often found myself thinking about the decisions I made and whether I made the right calls. That reflection has really shaped my research.”
When her three minutes were up, she could barely unmute herself. “My hands were shaking,” she said. “That day I was just focused on telling my story, pouring my heart into it, and hoping that it would resonate.”
Zavala’s pitch was a reminder that some of the most compelling research often begins not in a library or lab, but in everyday life. Second-place finisher Emily Cauble arrived at the same conclusion, but from a different background. A PhD student in Health Promotion Sciences, Cauble opened with a simple yet compelling question. How many personal care products did you use this morning? The number, she noted, is often higher than we think – and for women, the implications may be more serious than we’ve considered. Her research, drawn from data on roughly 13,000 women, examines whether long-term product use during hormone-sensitive life stages may be linked to breast cancer risk.
“Maybe the path to breast cancer prevention doesn’t start in the clinic,” she said. “Maybe it actually starts at your bathroom counter.” What makes Cauble’s perspective distinctive is the path that brought her there. She began her career developing cancer therapies in a laboratory before her focus shifted toward prevention, toward the everyday, modifiable exposures that research hasn’t fully reckoned with yet.
“The goal of this work is to provide clearer information to support decision making and to help inform changes in product formulation and regulation,” she said. “Ultimately, it’s about reducing risk earlier in ways people, particularly women, can realistically incorporate into their daily lives.”
Where Cauble’s research asks us to reconsider what we put on our bodies, third-place winner Samantha Stombaugh asked the room to reconsider something even closer to home. A master’s student in Positive Developmental Psychology, Stombaugh’s
Practicing Love
sought to reframe romantic and social relationships not as matters of fate but of skill. She proposed a structured, evidence-based workshop to teach emotional regulation, attentive listening, and conflict repair before things fall apart. “This isn’t therapy,” she said. “This is prevention.” If we invest in physical health and professional development, why not invest in the relationships that research consistently identifies as the strongest predictor of long-term well-being?
Audience Choice winner Aurora Jimenez-Guerrero took a different approach entirely — she didn’t open with a question or a statistic. She opened with the invocation of a memory. “Close your eyes and think about your childhood — the people, the stability, the comfort — and then imagine all of it disappearing overnight.” It’s the reality for students in foster care, and it set the stakes for her pitch,
Building Bridges, Defending Futures
, which centered on one of the least visible figures in that system: the foster youth liaison.
These are the school district employees charged with holding things together for students who move between placements, schools, and agencies, often losing credits, relationships, and momentum with every transition. “Policies require the role to exist,” Guerrero noted, “but almost no research examines what it takes to do it well.” Her dissertation hopes to change that.
For all four winners, the research was personal, but so was the process.
In the post-competition discussion, a few key challenges surfaced consistently between all the contestants: translating years of specialized work into language anyone could follow, the hours of preparation it required, and — perhaps most unexpectedly — the years many spent hesitating before finally entering. The Big Pitch, it seems, has a way of making that leap feel worth taking.
Marcus Weakley, Director of the Center for Writing & Rhetoric and the longtime organizer of the competition, has watched The Big Pitch grow from a new experiment into an institution. But the broader ideas behind it have stayed true. “Graduate research belongs to a wider world, and getting it there requires a skill that isn’t always taught in the classroom.”
The Big Pitch, for one afternoon a year, makes practicing that skill feel like it’s worth something.
The Big Pitch is open to all CGU graduate students. Learn more about how to enter at
cgu.edu/thebigpitch
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