I think I’ve taken every opportunity I’ve been given. I was coming towards the end of
my first Post-Doc contract and I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do next and
it was the first time I’d been in redeployment and I was thinking what do people do, how
does this work? I had a spare afternoon so I was just surfing the internet for things
that I thought could add to my CV and be interesting and I made a list of the Royal Society Parliamentary
Pairing Scheme, the British Science Association Media Fellowship and Soapbox Science, and
I said ‘I want to do all three of these’ and I applied for all of them repeatedly;
I think Soapbox Science I got on the second application, British Science Association Media
Fellowship I got on the second application, Parliamentary Pairing Scheme I got first time
round and those are probably things that have changed me most as a person.
I spend a lot of time doing things for Athena Swan now – I review for their panels, I
review internally at the University.
I really relish opportunities to broaden my experiences and to add something to my own
mind, my own skills set. Particularly the Parliamentary Pairing Scheme was not something
I’d ever really thought about doing before. I didn’t have any idea of how policies were
formed in Parliament. I’d heard of our local MP, Lillian Greenwood, but I didn’t really
know anything about what they did in Parliament, so that was a really exciting opportunity
to learn how they use science (or not, as the case may be!) to make decisions, and that
was a really reciprocal process because I hosted Lillian in Nottingham for a day and
she came round both Ropewalk House and this department, the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging
Centre, met a lot of my colleagues and a bit about what we do, and you could see she was
sort of visibly excited and moved by all of the things that we get up to, so that was
a really rewarding experience.
The media fellowship – I’ve always really valued the interaction between science and
the media. When I was a very small child I remember watching the Royal Institution Christmas
Lectures on television, and I think that disseminating science to the masses through media is an
incredibly important job to do, and I think to quote Jim Al-Khalili ‘In order to be
a good scientist you have to do outreach, but in order to do good outreach you also
have to be a scientist’. So I think it does fall to the role of the full-time ‘jobbing’
scientist to do the outreach and that’s something that I consider definitely a responsibility,
so the role of media fellowship was a really obvious thing for me to do. I spent a bit
of time at the BBC, learned how fast they have to turn information around, learned to
not over-value my writing so much because you have to write 30 pages of something a
day and they’ll sort of read one paragraph of it and say ‘I’ll take this one’ and
the rest gets thrown out, and it really felt like a lot of my work wasn’t being used
but it gives me a new perspective on how to write so actually lots of aspects have added
to lots of aspects of my own sort of real work as well.
I think it’s been 100% productive for me to take time away from my research to do these
things. It’s almost given me a completely new perspective when I come back. It means
that I have had something to share with my colleagues and something that I can collaborate
with different departments, working with the Media Department at the University, being
able to continue helping out where I can – it’s been really valuable.
I’ve never had too much trouble convincing my PI to go along with it. If I go into a
meeting or a PDPR or something I say ‘I’d like to do this, it’s something important
to me’, I’m lucky in that my PI has said ‘I don’t know why but I’ll support you
in it!’, so I think PI’s do, on the whole, realise that personal development is important
and that they don’t see personal development the same way that you see personal development
and so you need to take the reins on that – it’s your personal development – you
tell them what you need. I think if you’re really unlucky and have an unsupportive PI
the University does have a lot of avenues for you to seek the support that you need
in that and I would encourage you to do that.