• Question: Why did you enter here in the first place?

    Asked by roxannebrace to Dalya, Derek, Sarah, Tim, Tom on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Dalya Soond

      Dalya Soond answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      2 reasons:

      1) I love talking about science and sharing my passion for it with others, both co-workers and non-scientists. This is just one of a few public communications programs I have been involved in, but def the most fun.

      2) When we first heard of the show I’m a Celebrity, get Me Out of Here, my husband and I both decided they should make a show called I’m a Scientist, get me Out of Here and we wrote a whole long pitch to Channel 4 about it (although they never answered back, foolishly for them). You can imagine my surprise and excitement when I saw that someone seemed to have taken the idea up and I had to register. Of course, this is completely different from our idea which was just a reality TV show with hidden cameras up in lab filming what people REALLY get up to.

    • Photo: Tim Millar

      Tim Millar answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I thought it would be fun to talk what I do as a career and show others that they can do it too.

    • Photo: Derek McKay-Bukowski

      Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Several reasons.

      Firstly, because it seemed like an interesting thing to do. I’m always looking out for new and interesting ideas.

      I’m also interesting in encouraging students to consider some of the less obvious lines of science. Sure, loads of people want to be astronauts… but what about astronomy? space physics? meteorology? Geology? and a host of other fascinating and essential areas of the physical sciences.

      For the June 2011 event, I happened to be on site in the Arctic. This seemed like a good opportunity to talk to the schools at a time, when I had photographs on the web log and lots of interesting stories to tell.

      When I was young, there were a few people who inspired me to go into science. Now that I’m established in a career, I want to do the same. I feel that it is important for students, who are the verge of becoming adults to have a broad outlook on life — including careers — and this is my chance to share with them the work and experience that I have.

    • Photo: Tom Crick

      Tom Crick answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I’ve always been interested in science communication and public engagement: I enjoy going into schools and talking about computer science and the importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. I thought IASGMOOH would be an excellent opportunity to speak to a wide range of students across the UK and hopefully enthuse them about the wide range of science and how normal people become scientists! I was very lucky to have interesting and inspiring science and maths teachers at school, which can make a huge different to how you enjoy a subject — I enjoy what I do and find my work very interesting so hopefully other people will too!

      This has actually been a learning experience for me too, trying to remember stuff from across the sciences (some of which I haven’t thought about for years)!

    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I want to win the £500 prize money for my science communication project. I do a scholarship in science communication and I have created and run a cancer research workshop in schools and at science festivals. Please have a look at my profile and watch some of the short videos I have made for you to see what the workshop involves.

      The workshop is not funded which means there’s a limit on how many schools I can take the workshop to. And I think it’s a shame because there’s a lot of valuable info in the workshop and students seem to really enjoy doing it! I care a lot about showing people how they can protect themselves against cancer, and about some of the amazing research that it being done in the fight against cancer. Cancer is one of those subjects that I find a lot of people don’t really want to talk about but with so many families being affected by cancer, it’s something that people do have a lot of questions about. I want to help people understand it, and I want to encourage young people to study science as we need a new generation of brilliant young scientists to help us with this problem!

      It’s difficult to get funding to do science communication and I heard about this competition and I thought it was worth a go!

      If I win I will come to your school and do the workshop with your class if you like!! 😀

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