Blog posts

Filmings and Finales

So much to catch up on this blog, where to to begin, probably where I left off, week of 18th Sept.

When I didn’t think there could be more variety, lo and behold, there it was. After starting off the week continuing some policy work on the EU and some more video project work, I helped supervise a teacher training event the RAS was holding as part of ESERO’s “Misson X” programme. Learning about the Education & Outreach side to the society was really interesting.

I also attended a filming for a new episode of Objectivity, a youtube series focussed on antique objects, whilst also doing some behind the scenes research for it.

How is your drainage?

There was a lot of time pressure in the last week of the internship as I tried to keep up with the project as it expanded. Originally I was going to catalogue the contents of 2 barns of agricultural equipment but ended up doing at least double that (Sacrewell has a seemingly endless supply of equipment). With the cataloguing done, I then had time to stay on and help decide what would happen to the 600+ objects I had spent hours nurturing and puzzling over. For the purpose of this task we adapted the game ‘snog, marry, avoid’ and created ‘sell, keep, scrap’.

Open House and Meetings Galore

Been another hectic week of mixed activities at the RAS. Start off by continuing on with my EU project work , apparently leaving a multinational organistion is  quite confusing. Started reaching some conclusions on that front with the UK’s relation with the EU. On the rest of the policy front, I started and finished drafting the targeted MP letters for the RAS, and then was given the task of compiling a list of MPs with relevant interest.

Doing a little research work for the library, I helped catalogue some books to move to the reserve collection. Who knew that there used to be dictionaries of famous people, which contained their families and addresses?

Macmillan Weeks 9-11

As we’re coming up to my last 3 weeks at Macmillan, I have finished up on my part of the Patient Needs in Digital project. I have been looking into how the best cancer apps on the market cater to patients, evaluating what the key features are and how I personally rate the user experience of apps such as oWise and iCancerHealth. Having just finished my final report on these apps, it has been amazing to delve into the details of what makes apps successful, both in terms of aesthetics and practicalities. Allowing me to write my own recommendation for how Macmillan should focus their future efforts shows that they have put effort into the journey of work they have given me, and has been a really rewarding way to end the internship scheme.

Finishing up

Following my last post, I’ve finished building all of the interactive fly throughs, and added the rest of the content to the website. Now all that is left to do is change the DNS configuration to point the domain at the new server. I will be explaining how to use wordpress to the church committee, and following up any questions they may have. I will be staying in contact with the church, so that I can help if there are any technical issues. I will also be explaining how to use instagram, so that they can be cool and trendy.

I’m waiting on the church of england technical proposal document, as it isn’t yet at the stage for me to add the information about WiFi and projector installations.

Jack of all trades : My first week at RAS

So I just finished my first week at the Royal Astronomical Society, on an internship funded by the Charity Insights scheme, (which I guess you’ve figured out, by finding this blog). The Royal Astronomical Society is the national learned society covering Astronomy, Astrophysics and surprisingly, Geophysics. It’s nearly 200 years old, celebrating its 200th Anniversary in 2020.

The headquarters of the RAS are in Burlington House, just off Piccadilly and they are surrounded by a plethora of other societies, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry, Royal Geological Society and the Royal Academy of Arts. (On the left is a pretty picture of the entrance for the RAS)

With the first week of my internship over, I’ve been working mainly between assisting with the library(pretty picture featured), outreach and education and some policy work.

Going the extra mile

To say that my time at Clarity was boring and that I had nothing to do, would be a blatant lie. With the looming deadline for the release of the new product line hanging above us, we were constantly creating, constantly reformulating and improving, in order to provide Clarity’s customers with the best products. We were so busy with this work that unfortunately my project on the removal of triclosan from the hand washes was halted. However, the company saw the importance of the project that I was meant to undertake and gave me the opportunity to carry on with them for another four weeks, to focus solely on improving their antibacterial hand washes.

Macmillan Weeks 6-8

Now about halfway through my internship, my timetable and work was becoming more regular. Like previously mentioned, Macmillan offer training courses to their staff, which interns can join too if we email a week before – so I’ve been making a note of when to email to try and get a place. Luckily I managed to get a place on Writing for Macmillan, which was really interesting as it investigated the approach for how the charity writes and portrays itself to others. Similarly, I had an induction with someone from the Cancer Information Development team which I found very useful to discover how the charity utilises the information it has to make it as effective as possible.

How to be Sensible about Science – End

Dear future intern,

This week was spent mostly finalising all of the work I did and archiving everything. I added subtitles to the videos that have been made. I exported them all for YouTube. I digitally organised and filed away all my work for future reference. I followed up my Ask for Evidence Campaign entries.

The highlight of the week for me, was a co-worker realising she has been pronouncing my name technically incorrectly throughout my internship and finding this unacceptable. This was during a sci-fi and fiction pub quiz we went to. We came third place! (they also went to a movie quiz but I couldn’t make that one, sad face) Next week, I will be attending a talk with them at the Science Museum.

How to be Sensible about Science – Middle

Dear future intern,

If you are to take one advice from my entire series, make it this one. Have you ever been to barber? It doesn’t matter if you haven’t. I’m sure you’ve seen a boy in the past with a horrible new haircut and thought to yourself “How did he ever think that style was good idea?”. Well, I’ll tell you the answer; he didn’t. The thing about barbers is, if you don’t specifically tell them what you are expecting to get out of your visit, they will just give you the generic haircut they are familiar with. It’s not their fault, it’s the customer not communicating their expectations properly.