Month: July 2016

Getting started at the UK Stem Cell Foundation

My first day:

I arrived at the rather impressive Royal Institute of Great Britain ready to begin work at the UK Stem Cell Foundation. I entered the building where I met my supervisor, Hugh. He gave me a brief induction and tour of the building, including the theatre where so many major scientific discoveries have been announced.

Royal Institute of Great Britain, London
Royal Institute of Great Britain, London

With the welcome over, we began discussing my role at the charity in more detail and the plan of action for my first week: RESEARCH. I was to build a network of sportsmen and women, sports club, sports brands and sports bloggers to contact about becoming involved with raising public awareness of the UKSCF. I got straight to work, doing my best to make a good early impression with my new boss.

Rest of the week:

Research can be quite frustrating and a little tedious, however the long hours of staring at a computer screen were broken up with interesting conversations with Hugh. When lunch comes around I am most happy to get the chance to stretch my legs and I go to explore the area around the office.

I have enjoyed my first week at the UK Stem Cell Foundation and I look forward to taking the research I have done, and hopefully convert these contacts into ambassadors and donors (of their time, not necessarily money) for the charity. I believe I have successfully put together a database of useful contacts, which we will begin to make contact with in the coming weeks. I have also been identifying interesting and discussion-provoking stem cell news to post on social media in order to increase interest in the general public. Finally, we have discussed my work for the coming weeks, which includes designing a fundraising and public awareness campaign for a Centre in Regenerative Medicine for Sport and Trauma, which I am excited to get started on.

Skills that I have learnt this week:

  • Importance of patience and calmness during research
  • Effective research
  • Office/ business etiquette

When you get the timing just right….

I picked the best month to do my internship at Anthony Nolan. (A charity that saves the lives of people with blood cancer or blood disorders). I have now started my third week and last Friday was the annual staff picnic. This is a day where the whole charity comes together (minus vital staff required to keep the charity running) to look at what has been happening over the past year and what the goals are for the coming one. This lead to a gathering of around 300 people in the great hall of London Metropolitan University.

The morning started off with a speech from the CEO. She was very uplifting about what has been achieved over the last year, such as the charity being in the Sunday Times Top 100 not-for-profits to work for and achieving a one-star accreditation in the Sunday Times Best Companies annual ranking. She also was very positive with the goals for the future, ultimately a three-star accreditation and a higher rank.

In the course of the morning there was also a speech from a transplant recipient. Her story really brought home the reason why what Anthony Nolan does is so amazing. Without the bone marrow register she would not have been up there giving that speech.

There was also a Q&A with the Senior management team with questions that ranged from the light-hearted ‘What did you want to be when you grew up?’ to ‘How is Brexit going to impact the company?’. Then there was a chance for all of the different departments to showcase what it is that they do. Most used comedic videos to achieve this, such as filming from a camera strapped to the back of a dog and making it into a silent film. This was great and it showed me that despite the serious work that they do they sure know how to have fun.

After all this was done everybody migrated to Hampstead Heath to have a picnic. Despite having to queue for 20 minutes to get my sandwiches this was a great opportunity to get to know my co-workers a little better and was a very enjoyable experience. If you are reading this blog because you are thinking of doing charity insights I cannot recommend highly enough taking opportunities to socialise as knowing your colleagues makes the whole experience more enjoyable and far less scary.
Hampstead Heath 2

End of the internship at London Wetland Centre.

My internship at London Wetland Centre has finished. It has been great 4 weeks. I have done all the fieldwork designed by myself and I have completed my report for WWT. I marked all the sites where different species of ladybirds were spotted on the map of LWC and included it in my report. The main findings from my quantitative measurements are as follows:

  • Ladybird community at LWC is dominated by harlequin ladybird – Harmonia axyridis, which comprises 70% of all tree-living ladybirds at LWC.
  • There is a positive correlation between the density of aphids on the tree and the abundance and diversity of ladybirds living on the tree.
  • Spiders and mites (known together as Arachnids) presence was found to have no influence on ladybird prevalence.
  • Similarly, ants showed no or very weak correlation with prevalence of different ladybird species.

ladybirdgraphSuch dominance of harlequin ladybirds is pretty amazing considering that this species was firstly noted in England in 2004. It took it only a decade to outcompete native UK ladybirds and become the most common species, which is why it draws attention of scientists and it has been extensively studied over the last couple of years.

As this is my last post, it is time to reflect upon the benefits I gained from Charity Insights. This project was a fantastic opportunity to step into a completely new environment. I met some interesting people and I got a chance to work in the office for the first time in my life. I used to cooperate with nongovernmental organisations in the past as a volunteer, but it was never a regular work on a daily basis. Thanks to this project I could get a good insight into the way a conservation charity is run. I was working under supervision, but at the same time I was to some extent independent and this independence was important, because it gave me a lot of freedom in terms of my style of work. On the other hand, having this independence required making decisions by myself and hence taking full responsibility for my actions and being self-disciplined. Being in charge of my own project gave me a lot of self-confidence, which will certainly help in my future career no matter what path I choose in the end.

In order to complete my project I could finally use the skills that I gained throughout my degree like maintaining scientific rigour while desigigning and performing the experiment, doing statistical analysis of data, writing scientific report in the real-life situation. The point of all the effort that I put into this project was not to get a good grade, but to collect information that are useful to somebody and may be used in their future work. I must admit that it was very satisfying.

I have commented about how great LWC is in my previous posts, so I am not going to repeat myself. But here are some photos just to emphasise what a nice place London Wetland Centre is.

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BNA: THE INTERNSHIP BEGINS (1/3)

Hello! I’m Anna, an incoming third year Biologist.

Firstly, let me introduce you to the charity I have chosen to work with. The British Neuroscience Association (BNA) is the leading neuroscience charitable organisation in the UK, and functions to bring together researchers, organisations and individuals which are involved with, or have an interest in, neuroscience. It’s a charity chiefly run for and by scientists and thus must have specifically tailored marketing strategies to appeal to such a niche demographic – which is what first drew my attention to BNA.

The beginning of my internship did not start well. I woke up on Monday morning feeling absolutely awful, and made it halfway down the road before I gave in and had to call in sick. My supervisor was really lovely about it, and agreed that we’d start on Tuesday, in Cardiff, instead. As I was based in Bristol, two trains were required to reach the BNA office in Cardiff – the first of which was (typically) majorly delayed and the second of which I consequently missed. I therefore ended up starting my internship a day late and literally late… not a great beginning, I think you’d agree.

Regardless, as soon as I managed to actually begin I found myself really enjoying the project. After discussing with my supervisor, we identified a couple of project niches: how to increase undergraduate membership (and potentially set up some kind of student representative scheme), and how to effectively market the new membership category, associate membership.

I was given quite a lot of freedom to brainstorm this, and was also afforded the opportunity to speak to leading neuroscientists, who were serving on the BNA committee. Not only could I ask people who started off with the same credentials as myself (a degree in Biology) about how they informed their career paths, but also talk to experts who shared my scientific interest. After listening to their thoughts on the reality of carrying out my project, I began to plan day-by-day what I would actually be doing.

I spent Wednesday in Bristol, and Thursday in Brasenose College, Oxford, where I talked to Prof. John Jefferys about my plans for the next few weeks. We had lunch in the Brasenose senior common room (think wood panelling, huge fireplaces and unbelievable portraits), and afterwards took a brief look around the Ashmolean. It was a lovely day – I had a lot of fun, and it was great to be able to talk with such an interesting individual!

Brasenose College I
Brasenose College II

On Friday, I was lucky enough to sit in on a lab meeting between Neuroscience postdocs at Bristol University. They were interested in how natural circadian rhythms of stress hormones like corticosterone could be mimicked to improve the side effects of prescribed steroids, using rats as a model animal (if you’re interested, here’s a bit of background). Everyone was really friendly and happy to discuss their data with me; hopefully at some point I can go down to the labs and actually see some of their research.

Luckily I arrived just in time for the Bristol Harbour Festival on the weekend, which was a great chance to explore the city and eat some awesome food. I also looked around Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, where I got to see Rembrandt’s Self-portrait at the age of 63, one of the last paintings he did before his death.

London National Gallery Next 20 09 Rembrandt - Self Portrait at the Age of 63
Self Portrait at the Age of 63

To conclude: I’ve had a great introduction to my internship and am really excited to continue with my project next week…

–> NEXT TIME

Eden Project Internship – First Day

The Eden Project mostly known as a popular visitor attraction in beautiful Cornwall. It is famous for having the largest captive rainforest its Rainforest Biome and also for it’s Mediterranean Biome. Additionally, they have the popular Eden Sessions during summer, which are concerts held at its main stage. However, mainly Eden is an educational charity that aims to reconnect people with the natural world and with each other. They do this by using leaflets, informational boards and interactive exhibits around the site.

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The project I am involved with at the Eden Project is called ‘Life Givers’ and it aims to communicate the worlds’ and in particular Eden’s energy story using a trail of sculptures and other art-based exhibits. These exhibits will show the range of ways people harness energy and the steps taken towards a carbon-neutral world. The end result will be a physical trail along Eden’s Zigzag pathway with the exhibits serving as checkpoints. At each exhibit there will be information on boards to explain the nature of the exhibit, with further information in a trail guide which will be available at the start of the trail.

My main role in the project will be to work with the interpretations team in collecting all the necessary information that will eventually be condensed onto the boards and the trail guide as a story line. The research conducted will be collected into a ‘Masterfile’; a scientific document which will serve as the backbone for the whole project. This will need to be properly referenced and coherent so that it can be understood by partners of the project and other friends of Eden and also for gaining the correct permissions for material printed for the general public.

12th July 2016, was my first day as an intern at the Eden Project. I met up with Sarah Peake my contact and supervisor at Eden at 10am, at the Foundation Building of Eden. On meeting Sarah, who was so friendly I was immediately put at ease. I was taken to where my desk will be, and was briefly introduced to fellow interpreters and other teams working at Eden. I was then given a tour around the building. Later, we sat down in the staff room dining area and discussed the project. I was given a folder which included a draft proposal for the Masterfile, a content research brief and  an ‘Eden Internship Objectives’ questionnaire which will act as a personal guide to what I should be doing at each stage of my internship. I was then taken to be given an Eden Badge(yay!) which included a photograph(not so yay) and was then given time to read through the proposal for the Masterfile so that I could clarify any doubts I had over lunch.

For lunch we were joined by Jo Elworthy, who is the Director of Interpretations and a fellow intern who is also working on the Life Givers project. After lunch, Jo went over the proposal in more detail – as she was the one that actually wrote the proposal – and explained each section in detail. We were also treated to a few lovely and unbelievable stories about Jo, her life and how she got involved with Eden. After lunch, I was shown around the Eden site and the easiest ways to get to the Foundation building from the site.

After returning to the Foundation building, I set to work with the draft of the Masterfile. Sarah then signed me up for a Welcome Week programme the following week and I was told that I could work on any area that I would like to despite initially being proposed the energy story of Eden- the relationship with Eden and their energy provider Good Energy. After separating the proposal into sections to organise my thoughts and adding a few notes of my own, I decided to start working on the Nuclear and Geothermal story of Eden and then venture onto the story with Good Energy. I decided to also try do some work on the new and emerging technologies with respect to energy.

For the following weeks, I hope to finish both the Nuclear and Geothermal Masterfile entries. This will involve sections for each including its history, the process, any challenges and their solutions if any. However, I believe the emerging technologies section will take longer as it will involve more reading than the other sections as the range will be wider. This I plan on keeping up throughout my stay at Eden, as it depends on how many articles I read and if I come across any new developments.

Internship with LED: First Week

I have completed my first week of my internship with the charity Light Education Development (LED) and it has been an interesting experience so far. Although I have been given a direction for the project, I also have the opportunity to be independent and to choose my focus and my approach. My project is related to the work the charity does providing solar lights to families in Peru and Nepal with no access to electricity. I am researching the different lamps on the market and evaluating their suitability for the charity’s needs. Beyond this, the content of the report is at my discretion; how scientific to make it, how many products to consider, how to compose the layout. I have been impressed by the number of products on the market and I’ve enjoyed learning about innovative new technologies and what to expect from the future of solar energy.

LED provides solar lights to families in these areas as they have no access to electricity, meaning that once the sun goes down life effectively stops. Providing a source of light means children can complete their homework and other tasks after dark, meaning they can progress with their education and ultimately escape from the poverty trap.

Below are images courtesy of LED (https://lighteducationdevelopment.org/) showing the solar lights they currently use.

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© Light Education Development

It was great to touch base with my supervisor to ensure my research was along the right lines and also to share some of my preliminary findings. As well as recommending a particular solar light unit that could be used I will also be investigating different avenues to consider in terms of collaborating with manufacturers or other charities to try and provide as many as many lights as possible. If I have time I would also like to consider this in terms of the work the charity does relating to the provision of education and healthcare in these villages.

So far I have had a great experience and I look forward to continuing on this project and producing a report that benefits the charity and the people who they help.

 

Farewell to Future Frontiers

The final week has been quite hectic. After finally getting hold of adobe acrobat, a software which allows you to make interactive PDFs, I have gone back to working on…

Task 1: Academic Plan

Getting to grips with the software was hard. But, generally, most of the problems I was having, others had also had, so Google could help me out. (Tech aside: Acrobat allows you to add javascript to the PDF, but it’s a bit weird getting your head around how it works).

What I ended up creating are PDFs, one for each year group, which allow students to see what grades they need to achieve at the end of each school year in order to be on track for their chosen career. Here’s how it works for year sevens. 2

Pupils enter their name and choose an industry and career from the drop down menu, as shown above. 

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They then press the orange ‘set’ button which means that the career now shows up in bold. Next, they select which route they plan to take to get there by selecting the relevant buttons on the right. 

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Pressing the ‘Add Image’ button takes them to this screen.

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Students then click within the box and choose any image they like from the file system.

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Now they move on to setting their grades using this section of the PDF.

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They choose the relevant grade format that their school uses.

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And fill in the grades as appropriate.

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After pressing ‘Set Changes’ the document automatically fills to show what grades they need. If they need higher GCSE grades for their desired career, they can increase these using the black arrows to the right.

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The students end up with a document like this, which is good for many things. Notably;

  • The school can use them to display the work of Future Frontiers in the school .
  • Pupils can use them as a guide to reaching their top career.
  • Future Frontiers can use them to assess the success of the program.

Going Forwards

This is a great way of ensuring a long lasting impact of Future Frontiers on the pupils with which they work. A future use for these is using them as some form of certificate in the graduation ceremony at the end of the program.

Task 2: Coach Quiz

This has a lot more loose ends to tie up. Firstly, I have to put it online so that Future Frontiers can access it, and then there are a few features I’d like to add. At the moment, it isn’t that much better than something like survey monkey, and in fact something like this would maybe be better in that the person issuing the quiz receives more tracking information of who has done the quiz and also can add and remove questions quite easily. The main advantage of the quiz I made is that it’s a bit more professional to have one personal to the organisation!

So, I’d like to improve the quiz by adding in these features and then also making the training more extensive, by adding more content, videos and perhaps even different training modules.

What else?

Something else Future Frontiers would like is a very simple app to be able to ask the pupils for feedback on each session so that they can ensure their programs are making an impact. The app may also have other functionalities such as reminding the pupils of the targets they set themselves. This is something I would quite like to work on with them, time permitting.

Overall

I have rally enjoyed my time working with this charity and have learnt a lot about technology, and also about how busy working in a new charity is! I hope my help has proved useful and that I will be able to work with them in the future. Thank you, Charity Insights, for giving me this awesome opportunity.

St. Anne’s Community Services – who, what, where and why?

I thought I’d dedicate my first blog post to explaining at little bit about my internship, and the organisation that I’ll be working with over the coming weeks.

St. Anne’s Community Services is a charity based in Leeds that provides a huge variety of services to many groups, from the homeless to those with mental health problems, from asylum seekers to people with substance abuse issues. In 2014 (see my previous Charity Insights blog posts!) I carried out a project at St. Anne’s that was focused on Alcohol Related Brain Damage, or ARBD, in the homeless. I really enjoyed working with the team at St. Anne’s and really admired the (often difficult) work that they do, so it’s no surprise that I’m back again!

This year, my project is focused on Spice, a synthetic cannabinoid that, until May 26th, was classified as a ‘legal high’. Before this date, it was legal to sell Spice in the UK, so it could be purchased on the internet and even in shops. Due to increasing concerns about the effects of Spice on both the physical and mental health of its users, on May 26th this year it became illegal to sell it, or to possess with intent to sell.

Spice comes in hundreds of different varieties, is relatively cheap, and can have a huge range of effects, most of which are not desirable. These range from black-outs, anxiety and a racing heart to seizures, psychosis and even death.

So where does my project come into all this? During my time at St. Anne’s in 2014 I spoke to quite a few service users who had mentioned Spice. I didn’t know what it was, so decided to investigate. After speaking to the staff and doing some research of my own, I realised just how serious this problem was, especially amongst the homeless. Worryingly, because Spice has only begun to be abused relatively recently, there is little or no data available on its use, long-term and short-term effects.

During my internship this year, then, I will be gathering information from service users at St. Anne’s (who are homeless or what we call ‘vulnerably housed’) about their experiences with Spice. In addition, I will also be working closely with the staff to gauge their knowledge and experience of the drug and its effects. The aim is to help St. Anne’s understand how and why the homeless are using Spice, if they contact the emergency services as a result, and how they are obtaining it now that the law has changed. We also want to ensure that the staff have all the knowledge they need to identify someone who has taken Spice, and ensure that they receive the appropriate care. It’s a challenging area, but it’s so important that we learn more about this really worrying trend.

If you want to find out a bit about the effects of taking Spice, watch the episode of ‘999: What’s Your Emergency?’ that was broadcast on 11th July 2016 on Channel 4. It shows how the emergency services are trying to deal with the devastating effects of legal highs, and is a bit of an eye opener. Take a look.

Save the Rhino: The Importance of Image

Save the Rhino is a small charity which has a vision for all five species of rhino to thrive in the wild for future generations to enjoy. They do this by funding a variety of programmes in Africa and Asia. I have been working part time for Save the Rhino for three weeks now, totaling six days and you’d be surprised at how much you can learn in so little time.

My passion is conservation and once I had already experienced other routes of conservation, such as field work and zoo programmes, I wanted to turn towards charities. I’m lucky enough to have two supervisors which allows me to focus on two areas of charity work, these are events and corporate relationships. This means I have a large variety of tasks, every day is different, so no excuses for boredom!

However, what has struck me is the importance of large events for small charities such as Save the Rhino. That may seem obvious to you but I don’t think you realise quite how prepared we are. The London Marathon is Save the Rhino’s largest event and even though it is not taking place again until April 2017, my first task when I sat in that office was to update the London Marathon webpage and everyday since, there has been a task dedicated to it.

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If you didn’t know, Save the Rhino is famous amongst the London Marathon runners because of its iconic and pretty awesome rhino costumes (if you want that extra challenge when already running a 42km race). They weigh 8-10kg and you can’t see far ahead as the rhino head obstructs your view.

My work at Save the Rhino hasn’t been marked by the tasks that I’m doing but about the image a charity creates. The London Marathon is so important to Save the Rhino not only because it raises important funds but also because it follows their image of endurance and extreme sports, ultimately this comes through in all the work that I do with Save the Rhino – this is what everything revolves around.

St John Ambulance – First Week

Hello from sunny Bristol!

St John Ambulance (SJA) is the nation’s leading first aid charity, training over 400,000 people on life-saving first aid skills every year. SJA volunteers provide first aid cover across the country for all sorts of events, big and small, as well as working alongside the NHS in responding to 999 calls.

I have been with the organisation for over 14 years now, starting at the age of six when I joined as a ‘badger’ (the name for SJA’s youngest members). I then became a cadet at the age of 10 and I am now currently an operational first aider, helping to provide first aid treatment to thousands of members of the public at various events. Each year SJA as an organisation treat many thousands of casualties, with the South West Region treating over 2400 patients during the 5579 events covered in 2015.

The aim of my project is to analyse the injury data from the events covered in South West Region during 2015 to identify any patterns or trends in injury occurrence which may help SJA to reflect how volunteers are trained going forward. I also intend to identify high-risk events where particular injuries occur, with the vision of providing more specific training to volunteers in these areas, allowing for the optimal care and treatment of our patients.

During my first few days so far I have been using SJA’s online platform ‘DIPS’ (Duty and Information Planning System) to trawl through hundreds of events covered by Central District (one of the five districts that make up South West Region) and extract the information I need to fulfil the aims of my project. Having created a spreadsheet of the data, I have been able to present this data visually in the form of graphs and charts, which will be included in my report detailing the results/findings of this project. Tomorrow, I need to contact the unit managers across the South West region to ask for their first aid training programmes (so I can compare the first aid taught to volunteers against the typical injuries treated) and also create a survey that I plan to distribute to volunteers to gain an insight into their experience of treating patients whilst out on duty. Hopefully this will allow me to analyse the results of the survey as I enter the second week of the project.

The week so far has certainly been insightful. It is interesting to see the different types of events covered by SJA and the areas that are ‘higher risk’ for more serious injuries. It has also been an opportunity to experience working in an office environment on a 9-5 daily basis. Although having known some of the staff here for many years, there are still new people I meet each day and I’m made to feel very welcome (I was even given my own desk space, computer and had a swipe pass made, so felt just like one of the team!).

To complete this post, here’s a recent throwback to when I made my SJA debut at Lords. Today is the first day of the England vs Pakistan test match at Lords Cricket Ground, which is where you’d probably find me (if I were not in the office here in Bristol!), helping to provide first aid cover for the 29000 spectators at the home of cricket!

Lords Pitch Side