Science Magazine announced its 9th annual Dance Your PhD Contest — a competition for best explaining your PhD research in an interpretive dance.
On a scale of 0 to 100, how cool is this, a PhD in an interpretive dance? I’d give it no less than a 90.
Unfortunately the contest is open to science majors only: the prize categories are Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Social Sciences, as detailed here. I wish we had this in computer science and engineering. Not that I am a great dancer myself (I am a terrible dancer …. could I swim, bike, and run my PhD instead?), but I am in awe of the artistic creativity that these dances demonstrate.
Maybe Communications of the ACM would be up for sponsoring this, for computing / engineering disciplines? In 2014 a UIUC engineer managed to squeeze into this contest’s Physics category with a dance of humans and drones. In an ACM Dance Your PhD Contest, we’d probably see so many robotic dances, we’d probably have to create different prize categories, for different robots and different ratios of dancing humans to dancing robots. Wouldn’t that be fun?