Month: July 2016

My first week at Anthony Nolan

Anthony Nolan save the lives of people with blood cancers or blood disorders by matching individuals willing to donate their blood stem cells or bone marrow to people who need lifesaving transplants.

I first got marrow (2)involved with Anthony Nolan through Marrow at Imperial. This is Anthony Nolan’s University Branch and we run recruitment events to sign people up to the register, fundraise and spread the word about how easy it can be to save somebodies life. Next year I will even be taking the plunge along with a whole group of nationwide marrow volunteers and jumping out of a plane to raise as much money as possible. It’s a society well worth being a part of.

The goal of my charity insights project is to increase new donor engagement with Anthony Nolan particularly to increase interaction with young men online. This group is targeted because 50% of donations come from young men while they only make up 15% of the register. In 2015-16 only 27% of all online applications came from young men. This needs to be changed by creating engaging content on platforms that young men are influenced by.

During the first week I have been analysing the current research Anthony Nolan has done as well as looking at different methods by which they could increase awareness around the charity. This could be done through livestreaming events and looking for vloggers/bloggers who may be willing to discuss Anthony Nolan with their audience.

I also have used the opportunity to explore different aspects of the charity. On Tuesday I had the opportunity to meet a donor and it was inspiring to meet someone willing to do something so selfless. Later that evening I had another interesting experience in the form of a spit kit social. To add people to the register they must first be tissue typed which requires a spit sample. At the social the tubes required for this are individually labelled by volunteers before being packed up and sent out. I didn’t appreciate the effort required until I’d labelled and packed a bag of 70 kits!

I have learnt a lot about the charity in this past week and what impressed me the most was how much everyone I have met cares about the charity and not only the patients that they aid but the donors too. Great care is taken of the donors from getting a visit from a volunteer during donation to travel and accommodation for them and a friend being paid for and follow up phone calls a few days and weeks after donation.

Anthony Nolan has been an amazing charity to work for. Before the first day I was nervous as I knew the style of working would be very different to anything I had experienced before but as soon as I arrived at the office I was put at ease by the friendliness of the staff and I soon adjusted to the offices way of working (though I’m not sure me or my bladder can get used to drinking so many cups of tea). I look forward to the next three weeks.

Future Frontiers

Since my last post, lots has happened. In fact, time has flown by and I can’t quite believe it’s my final week.

Alongside my projects, I have been helping to organise one of our coaching sessions for sixth former’s at a local law firm. Normally, we train students to be our coaches but in this unique case, we have trained lawyers. The students seem really keen and this week they were having speaking on Skype with all kinds of professional experts as part of the program; solicitors, aerospace engineers, robotics engineers, graphic designers. The program has been a real success.

Task 2: Coach Quiz 

Over the past couple of weeks I have steered away from task 1 as I awaited the decision to purchase the necessary software. Instead, I have been working on creating an induction quiz for new coaches to complete as part of their training.

.coachquiz

It’s a fairly simple quiz. Coaches are verified using their email and simply cannot move on until they get a question correct. At the end, the completion of the quiz is logged so future frontiers can keep track of who has completed it.

not-auth

If you aren’t authorised to complete the training, you will see this message.

authNames are stored alongside the email addresses to give a personalised greeting.

incorrectA user can’t move on until their answer is correct.

correctyOnce the question is answered correctly, the next button appears.

doneWhen it’s finally over, the coaches will see this well deserved ‘well done’ message.

But all this is pretty useless unless somebody can keep track of who has done the quiz! That’s where the control page comes in.

control panel

On this page you can see a list of all of the coaches who have been asked to do the quiz and whether they have completed it or not. As you can see, all coaches have an email address and full name, giving me the ability to make the personalised greeting message shown above.

The page makes it possible to do the following

  1. Log in/ Log out securely so that only those authorised to access the page can
  2. Add a new coach to the list
  3. Delete a specific coach from the list
  4. Delete all coaches who have completed the quiz from the list
  5. Search the list. For example, for coaches working in a specific school:search

I’d like to add more functionality to the control panel. For example, being able to add or remove questions, or being able to ‘undo’ a deleted coach. Alas, this project has been forced to be put on pause while I work on task 1 again.

Technology specific detour: For anybody interested, I decided to use PHP, MySQL and Javascript/JQuery for my quiz. Having little to no experience with back end web development, I knew that there was lots of support online for these and, as I had a fairly short time period, decided this would be the best option. Now that I am more familiar with the concepts, I hope to move on to some more modern technologies in the future…

 

Internship at London Wetland Centre – continuation.

I am in the middle of my internship at London Wetland Centre. I have finished sampling in the field and now I am moving on to data analysis and writing my report for WWT about ladybirds at LWC. Fieldwork was quite intense, it took 9 consecutive days of sampling, interrupted by the moody weather. Still, on most of the days I managed to sample throughout the whole day, but sometimes I had to stop after 2h due to rain. I must admit that I really enjoyed fieldwork – I was outside all the time and in the very pleasant surroundings, which fully compensated the repetitiveness of the actions that I had to undertake to collect enough data. Also, the working environment at London Wetland Centre is very good. Everyone is really nice and engaged in their work.

The choice of the right method that would enable me to achieve my aim, was occupying me for the first week of my internship. I eventually decided that for this habitat the best method would be so-called tree beating. This means that in order to sample I was holding a beating tray underneath a tree branch while hitting the same branch with a stick for a certain number of times and then examining what species of ladybirds, if any, were captured on the tray. I was also looking at ants and spiders that are natural enemies of ladybirds and at aphids that are ladybirds’ food. As sampling was going along, I noticed some limitations to my method, which I will now have to consider in my report. For the last part of my internship I will focus on analysing collected data. I will look at the proportional abundance of different species in ladybirds community at London Wetland Centre and the effect of the presence of aphids and natural enemies on the abundance and species richness of ladybirds.

While I was doing my fieldwork I got a chance to see how many visitors LWC has every day and what a wide range of activities is offered to them. I understood how important role LWC plays in educating people about wetlands and natural environment in general. They offer plenty of interactive educational tools for kids to learn about the most interesting species inhabiting wetlands, but also to learn about sustainable ways of living and the consequences of people’s irresponsible actions to the environment. My work also generated quite a lot of interest. Many visitors, especially children were intrigued by what I was doing and I had to answer loads of questions.

However, London Wetland Centre is important not only for its educational role, but also for improving the quality of Londoners’ lives. This peaceful area with thriving wildlife provides a great place to rest from the noise of the city. There are many bird watching points and a lot of benches all over the place where you can sit if you are tired of walking and simply enjoy the nature. LWC truly is a wonderful place!