Throughout my time at Save the Rhino I have had many opportunities to do a mixture of tasks to get a feel for everything that goes into charity work, with a particular focus on corporate relationships. However, working a 2 month period I have managed to “showcase” my skills and have been allocated a final task: data mining.
As a biologist we work strongly in statistics and with writing a personal blog, I find data mining very interesting. For those of you who don’t know: this is the act of searching a customer base to give a profile to a typical customer so that they can be targeted effectively. I was given access to the behind the scenes of all social media and Save the Rhino’s website to get an idea of the kind of supporters and traffic we attract.
I found it absolutely fascinating and terrifying the amount of information we seemed to know about our audience just through likes, favourites, and clicks. It is really interesting to not only know what kind of people we are attracting but also how web platforms are used. At Save the Rhino social media platforms are used by a completely different audience for a completely different reason to the website.
It is a great and final insight into the work of charities. This however is a universal skill that I can carry on to many different kinds of work and I’m glad I was given an opportunity to practice it in my final days.
When first arriving at Imperial College, thinking I had the next 5 years of my life planned, I never once considered working for a charity despite the number of times I had volunteered for one. However this was a different kind of volunteer experience to the rest, I think much of volunteering can be superficial as you’re only there for a few days a week and only for the time period of a couple of months. This experience definitely cannot be described as superficial, I was taught the ins and outs and I am very grateful for it. Perhaps charity work is appearing more on my horizon than I thought.
OneZoom are a small up-and-coming charity, founded in 2012, dedicated to providing educational material about evolution. They have developed a tool that allows users to view all species on earth in a huge evolutionary tree (you can see it here: www.onezoom.org/life). It has already been shown at science fairs across the UK, and is now a fixed feature at a number of museums of natural history around the globe. Despite its huge achievements, OneZoom is almost entirely the work of just two people, working in their spare time to make a vast body of knowledge on biodiversity and evolution available to anyone of any age.
Why am I working with them?
I first heard about OneZoom when Dr James Rosindell (OneZoom’s founder) gave a lecture at a conference called ‘mathematical approaches to evolutionary trees’. Although I am not a biologist, the word ‘mathematical’ caught my eye and I went along. I was fascinated by the approach that OneZoom took, and after spending several hours browsing the tree that evening, I was hooked. I later emailed James to see if I might be able to work with him, and a couple of outreach events and a research placement later, here I am!
What am I doing?
Whilst OneZoom works beautifully on a number of platforms, and can easily be accessed on a mobile phone, it still suffers a little from the reduced performance of mobile devices, meaning that navigation on these devices can be jerky. My role in OneZoom will be to work towards improving these mobile problems, specifically implementing a type of panning used by Google Maps on mobiles, where the image is only redrawn at the end of a swipe, instead of at every point along it.
My first week
Over this last week, I have been becoming familiar with the large codebase that OneZoom consists of, setting up a development environment, and making small improvements to the code along the way. Now I’m moving into the second week feeling familiar with the way things are fitting together, and ready to make a start implementing the panning improvements for mobile. Alongside the programming I’m also helping present OneZoom at the Science Museum Lates this Wednesday, and taking a trip to Oxford next week to work with OneZoom’s team in person. Wish me luck!
My internship at the Eden Project ended on the 12th of August, and I am now back in Reading missing the Cornish countryside tremendously. The whole internship experience at Eden was an incredible one. I have had some great experiences and met some amazing people and I consider myself very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with such an esteemed charity.
Carrying on from the previous blog post, by the time my internship had officially ended I had completed the Nuclear Energy masterfile entry and submitted it to Jo, the Director of Interpretations. I am now awaiting feedback on the document. I had not yet completed the Geothermal Masterfile entry as I still had to finish the referencing. However, the research was all complete and Emma and I spent my last week at Eden compiling all of our research into a storyline. The storyline skeleton consisted of key questions: What is geothermal energy – how it works; Why geothermal energy is a good idea and Why is Eden interested in using geothermal energy. For each section, two levels of detail was required. Firstly, the whole section needed to be summarised in three sentences. Secondly, all further additional detail needed to be summarised in 8 bullet points. Overall, this constituted as the backbone for the storyline. This would then be passed on to the graphics team who would pick out certain aspects which sound interesting and would appeal to the public in creating their designs. After sending our proposed storyline to Jo, we had a follow up meeting where she made edits and told us where we need to change what. This was the last ‘official’ meeting during my internship. I have since, completed the geothermal masterfile entry and also edited the geothermal storyline according to Jo’s requests.
During my last week I also had my ‘End of internship’ interview, wherein I sat with Jo and Sarah – my supervisor – and went through my ‘Start of internship’ interview questionnaire wherein I had written down my objectives, what I hope to contribute and accomplish during my internship, to compare what I had set out to do and what I had actually done. During the discussion we filled out an ‘End of Internship’ questionnaire. The interview went smoothly, I had achieved most of what I had set to do. However, I had underestimated the time it would take to complete two masterfile entries and therefore had not had any time to work on the ‘New and Emerging technologies’ section which I had included in my starting questionnaire. However, Jo and Sarah were very understanding about the time limitations and so this was not an issue.
On my last day, I had a goodbye lunch with Jo and Emma. It was a great end to the internship, I got to speak with Jo and explain what charity insights was as she was very interested in the scheme and was keen on introducing it to other universities. Afterwards, I bought some chocolate ladybugs – very Eden – for everyone in the office and left after saying goodbye to whoever was still at the office late Friday evening.
Overall, the experience was invaluable. I have now a good grasp on what it is like to work for an educational charity, their work ethics and their problems and issues especially with communicating and engaging the public. Whilst volunteering at charities such as Oxfam before, I was always in the front end i.e. serving customers or working in the shop, helping with layout and gift aid. This was an eye-opening experience as now I have a good idea about what happens in the back end of charities and the massive amounts of research, teamwork and cooperation that must go into each campaign/project that they produce. Alongside this insight, I have also gained numerous soft skills such as working in a team and interacting with other teams; setting personal deadlines; researching a large topic and picking out relevant information; summarising complicated processes in easy to understand terms amongst various others. To put it short working at Eden has been an experience of a lifetime.
Hello from sunny/miserably wet/weather-indecisive Powys.
Visitor numbers and hence audience figures for the Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB) talks have been low due to extremes of hot and wet weather. CAT tends to be busiest when it’s a bit cloudy since most families head to the beach on really hot days, and no-one wants to tramp about in the rain (at a mostly outdoor activity centre) when it’s pelting down! In between giving talks I continued to update the ‘Who’s Getting Ready for Zero’ database with new scenarios although progress has been hampered somewhat by an ultra-slow satellite link-up internet connection… At the end of last week my supervisor Paul and I began discussing the idea of doing a ‘Zero Carbon Liverpool’ for a collaborator and expanding the ‘Zero Carbon’ brand out to cities across the UK. It is not something that I could attempt in my final two weeks here, but instead a possibility for a long-term (6-month) project for the future. Since the database has been difficult to progress with I have taken on producing a two-page ZCB summary flyer for anti-fracking campaign groups so that they can present an alternative to the public.
I have met some really interesting people here at CAT since I arrived. On Tuesday I met a lovely couple, Paul and Fallon who came to my talk. We ended up discussing geopolitics and ecological living for about two hours (the talk is supposed to be 20 minutes long).
The water-powered lift for visitors.
On Thursday Roger, an old engineer who arrived at CAT in 1977 and who recently designed and built his own steam engine to power his Land Rover helped me take apart and clean an old piano. He was one of the original designers and engineers who built the water-powered lift that takes visitors from the car park to site level.
Last Wednesday I helped out on the door for my supervisor Paul who was giving a talk at a local arts venue, entitled ‘The Extraordinary Story of Human Beings, Energy & Happiness’. The story begins with the Big Bang and charts the course of human and technological development culminating in our present extreme energy culture.
The poster for Paul’s talk on the history and environmental impacts of human development
The talk describes how prior to the discovery of fossil fuels, the only energy that humans had access to came from an annual ration of sunlight stored either in plants, wind or rivers. Fossil fuels effectively gave us access to millions of years worth of solar energy, which we have subsequently burned up at an entirely unprecedented rate over the past 150 years or so. Tied-in with this is the story of how consumer Capitalism has given rise to over-consumption through advertising and public relations (originally branded as propaganda). There is then, the requirement for a new narrative and a positive vision for our future in which we live within our annual energy ration, but now with new tools to capture orders of magnitude more energy using renewable technologies. During the talk Paul was accompanied on piano and synth by Lola Perrin, a London-based composer and performer who wrote a score to accompany the piece. It received a lot of praise and positive feedback from the local audience and they have also been invited to perform the the Royal Opera House. I am expecting a front-row invitation.
This week I have been reflecting a lot on the importance of people and teamwork. CAT relies on volunteers and is a tolerant and considerate environment for people to come and work in. Sometimes these qualities mean that people on the fringes of society and with poor social conditioning are accepted onto the volunteer staff. While one of the functions of CAT as a charity is to act as a community hub, over the past week this has proven to be challenging to some of the volunteers (including myself) as one or two strong characters have dominated many social situations. A new week however brings with it a turn around of volunteers and has led to a new and fresh atmosphere.
The CAT reservoir from which drinking water (don’t worry it gets cleaned), lift power and hydroelectric electricity (when it’s working) are obtained
On the weekend my girlfriend Abi visited and we escaped to the nearby village of Caersws where we looked after some chickens and mostly sheltered from the tempestuous weather.
The sun came out at the beginning of the week and Paul was kind enough to let me swap Tuesday for Saturday so that we could spend the day enjoying the beautiful valley between Machynlleth and Corris. I still haven’t quite managed to persuade Abi to move to North Wales but I think swimming in the CAT reservoir surrounded by lush flora didn’t harm my cause…
So I’ve finally reached the end of my stay here in Paignton – and I know its cliché to say – but the time really did fly past! I really can’t believe its been a whole five weeks already. During my internship I learnt so much more than I thought I would about zoological research and now feel really confident in a lot of new skills . In this last week here I’ve simply continued the work I was doing at the half-way point, only now with complete independence.
The cutest and most amazing animal ever, the Emperor Tamarin
Looking back on my time as a whole, I have plenty of great memories and experiences. Everybody I met during my internship was amazingly supportive and lovely. What else would you expect from a group of biologists, eh? If I’m being completely honest though, I think I’m going to miss the primates more than anything – the Emperor Tamarins and Goeldis in particular. They’ve both now cemented themselves on my highly coveted list of favourite animals. An honourable mention also goes to the King Colobus family (and their new baby girl!). Maybe I’ll visit Paignton again in the years to come to see her as she grows up.
It wasn’t all easy though, I definitely will not be missing staring at vaguely Diana monkey shaped objects in the distance and trying to figure out whether they’re grooming or scratching, nor will I miss attempting to follow the five miniscule Pygmy Marmosets as they jet around their enclosure. It will also be nice to sleep in past 7am when I get back too…
Overall, I would just like to thank everyone at the Whitley Wildilife Conservation Trust for being so welcoming, as well as Lewis from Monkey Heights and the entire Ape Centre team for putting up with me bothering them every morning and endlessly asking “wait, what vegetable is this?” as I weighed up food. Personal thanks also go to Dr. Joanna Newbolt for all her help in my first few days as well as Louise for training me in my first two weeks. Thanks also go to the media team at the zoo for accepting some of my photographs for publishing on their webpages in the near future (I was hoping they’d be posted before this blog but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case!). I would, of course, also like to thank the entire charity insights team for awarding me this amazing opputunity because, without the funding and support I received, I would not have been able to relocate from London to Paignton and gain this invaluable experience.
During my four-week placement I will be working at the Brilliant Club, a charity which focuses on widening the participation of students from disadvantaged backgrounds at highly-selective universities. The charity runs a successful Scholars Programme which helps students to secure places at university by organising tutorials with PhD tutors for small groups of Year 6 to Year 12 students.
The charity is also in charge of running the Nuffield Research Placement in Greater London and Surrey which is the programme I am working on. The programme provides Year 12 students with the opportunity to complete a summer research placement in a STEM field thus enabling them to gain extremely valuable skills and experience, thus aiding them with their university application as well as equipping them with core competencies of a successful scientist.The scheme encourages applications from students with no family history of going to university, as well as those who attend schools in less well-off areas therefore the scheme greatly supports the idea of social mobility which I am greatly passionate about.
The reason why I’ve picked the Nuffield Research Placement scheme is because I completed a Nuffield Research placement at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre located in the Hammersmith Campus of Imperial College in the summer of 2014. The placement has greatly influenced both my university as well as course choices – it’s one of the main reasons why I’ve decided to apply to Imperial. Having experienced the great impact of the scheme myself, I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to see what the programme looks like from the other perspective whilst examining what social mobility is, what makes a successful social mobility scheme and what we can do to ensure to make such schemes even more effective, especially in the long term.
My first week
During the first week of my placement, I’ve focused on researching social mobility and looking at various social mobility related statistics which I will discuss later on, as well as seeing what running the programme for London and Surrey area entails. On my first day, we have visited students currently completing a placement at University of East London which has been designed to enable the students to develop key skills through independently carrying out research on a rapidly progressing area of science such as nanotechnology which will be of great help at university and beyond.
I’ve started my research on social mobility by reading a government issued report on the Social Mobility index, which looks at how well students from disadvantaged backgrounds do at school, and if they succeed later on in life. The educational attainment and outcomes achieved by adults serve as indicators of the extent of social mobility in the area, thus enabling the social mobility hot spots and cold spots to be identified. However, despite there being social mobility hot spots such as London, there is still a lot of work to be done to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially from areas where opportunities are not within reach, in securing places at university, good jobs and throughout their studies, which I will discuss in detail in my upcoming blog posts.
My internship has come to an end, my report has been completed and submitted to my supervisor and, so far, the feedback has been positive. I spent the final week continuing to write up my research and editing the content, reworking the structure and ensuring the formatting allowed me to present my findings in the best way possible.
I also met more of the trustees of the charity to hear about the work they do and to discuss the experiences they have had when visiting Nepal and Peru on numerous occasions and distributing the lights as they made their way up the mountain ranges. Hearing first-hand information about the lights that are currently being used and the feedback the trustees have heard from the recipients helped me to compare this standard to the other models I was evaluating. It helped to further define the necessary specifications of any products that should be recommended as it meant I could fully understand the kind of problems the lights can sometimes present.
Overall this has been a really enjoyable and rewarding experience. LED have been an amazing charity to work with and I hope to stay in contact with them and keep up to date with the work they are doing. Conducting my research and writing this report has been really eye opening as I had not previously realised how big a market there is for these products and how many charities there are focusing on delivering renewable solutions in developing countries. It was interesting to find out about the solar technology being implemented to provide light and electricity in rural areas, as well as new innovations to harness the power of movement and gravity, among others.
I would highly recommend taking part in the Charity Insights scheme; it offers the chance to spend a summer making a difference within a charity and gaining experience in an interesting field of work. This internship has made it clear to me that this is an area of research and innovation that I would like to explore following my degree, and I look forward to conducting my masters project into solar materials, hopefully building on what I have learnt over the summer.
I’ve had a rollercoaster ride of a first week at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) situated at the border of the Snowdonia national park in Wales. CAT is an education and visitors centre that aims to demonstrate solutions to sustainability. It was founded in the early 70’s in a disused slate quarry at a time when the scale of environment degradation from human activities was only just beginning to be understood. The early pioneers wanted to develop technology that could be of benefit to humans, nature and the economy. In a similar spirit, during CAT’s existent the quarry has been ‘rewilded’, and now hosts an abundance of wildlife.
Here’s the entrance to CAT. When it’s working, there is a car lift that is water powered.
It’s a kind of living laboratory for experimenting primarily with building and permaculture techniques. Many of the practices, materials and techniques developed here are finding their way into mainstream modern architecture. My favourite so far has been synthetic slate tiles that are made from recycled car tyres (touching is believing!).
Synthetic slate roof made from car tyres
I arrived on Monday, exhausted having just finished revision of a manuscript for publication at Imperial. I really, really could have done with a holiday! Instead I had volumes of literature to read in preparation for my designated project: I am presenting CAT’s flagship research project ‘Zero Carbon Britain’ (ZCB) to visitors to the centre during twice daily talks. ZCB is a technical energy scenario that presents a positive vision of how Britain can transition to zero CO2 emissions within around two decades. It aims to inspire debate and inform policy on how we can rapidly decarbonise the UK, whilst also highlighting the co-benefits of a zero carbon society e.g. cleaner air and healthier lifestyles.
Probably my favourite building at CAT- the walls are just straw bales with lime render and it’s been standing for a couple of decades already
I gave my first talk on Wednesday and have been steadily gaining confidence with the multitude of facts and figures that are required to look like any kind of authority on the subject. The audience figures have not been as high as we would have liked (ranging from around 2 – 14 per session) but the level of engagement and debate all round has been really positive. Alongside this core project I have started working on an update to an existing report called ‘Who’s getting ready for zero?’, which “…maps out how different actors at national, regional and city levels are already modelling the elimination of GHGs on science-based timeframes compatible with 2ºC.” Essentially ‘Who’s getting ready for zero?’ collates information from reports like Zero Carbon Britain from around the world to show what could be done to decarbonise the planet.
CAT has a great atmosphere to it. The people here are really friendly, helpful and there is a common purpose to the staff and volunteers. Outside of work I have been finding time to both socialise and to enjoy the beautiful natural surroundings. As an intern I have the privilege of being able to attend short courses that CAT runs here over the summer free of charge. I was lucky enough to participate in the ‘Nature Connection’ course that ran over the past weekend. The aim of the course was teach practices and routines for connecting more strongly with nature, for example by having a designated ‘sit spot’ which you visit every day to mindfully observe the plants, animals and landscapes around you. The course turned out to be much more powerful than I imagined (given that I was slightly cynical at the beginning). I could write a whole other blog about it but needless to say I highly recommend any reader to attend something similar. I came away feeling energised and ready for the new week ahead!
This is my new sit spot where I contemplate life and the universe…
I CAN’T BELIEVE FOUR WEEKS HAVE GONE BY SO QUICKLY!
The last two weeks have absolutely flown by. I finish my internship today – I’ll be sad to go. I’ve learnt a lot and met some really interesting people.
During my week break the new website went live, and I believe the new neuroscience Journal has been initiated – everyone in the office has been quite busy.
Last week was spent analysing all of the survey data I’d collected, and producing an overall marketing plan which could be used to inform the marketing approach of the BNA. This involved looking at the automatic analysis SurveyMonkey generated, and picking out/discussing the relevant information. In the week following, I formatted this all into a report, along with all of the other bits and pieces I’d been working on, like an application form for the Student Representative Scheme and undergraduate marketing materials.
As it’s my last day today, I’m currently condensing down my report into a succinct ten minute presentation that I can give when I attend the BNA council meeting on 24th August. After this I’m going out with my supervisor for farewell drinks, along with the other intern and her hosting lab – a lovely way to end my internship.
Taken out of context, this is probably a rather strange photo…
To conclude, this internship has definitely given me many transferable skills; it’s been a largely independent project and so I’ve had to practise organising my time effectively, along with learning how to be resourceful and tackle a complex/unexpected problem from many different angles. I hope my project will be of use to the BNA and help to increase their student and associate membership in future.
If anyone reading this is still debating over whether or not to apply for Charity Insights, I would thoroughly recommend it!
I have now completed my one-month internship with Anthony Nolan. For those of you who haven’t read my previous blog posts, Anthony Nolan is a charity that saves the lives of people with blood cancers or blood disorders. They match patients in need of a bone marrow transplants to selfless donors who have signed up to their register.
The internship was not quite what I had expected. This was in part because my original project goals changed. Initially my project was to create and share digital content that would encourage young men to sign up to the register. My first week went to plan and I studied research into how young men interact online but after that instead of creating new content I worked on promoting a piece of content called Donny and the Professor Cure Blood Cancer that tells the story of how a bone transplant works in a comic book themed story (and it’s a lot better than anything I could have done). The whole series can be found at www.anthonynolan.org/Donny.I also used the time to develop a spreadsheet of patient appeals from the past two years using Facebook to find the reach of each post and how much it was interacted with in terms of reactions or shares. This can be used by Anthony Nolan to determine which kind of appeal is most successful when they create future content.
So although my project didn’t go exactly to plan it was not half as scary as I expected it to be. The experience was very fulfilling and enjoyable.
During my internship I learnt the importance of teamwork both within one division and between divisions and how vital communication between teams is so the experience has taught me a lot about how to interact in a work environment. It was also so useful to gain an insight into what working for a charity entails and especially great to do it in a charity I care so much about.
I also very much enjoyed working with the Engagement team, they were all kind, considerate and helpful from my first day until my last and I just want to Thank them and everybody else that I worked with during my time at Anthony Nolan for making the experience so good.
I look forward to the year ahead, working with the Marrow team to run fundraising and recruitment events within Imperial.
