Month: September 2017

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.

Also in my last week, I started rounding up some of the longer projects I had been working on.

  • Monday was recording the videocast project I had been working on for the library and also editing the video.
  • Tuesday I handed off the EU policy work that I had been working on the entire time, (which apparently might be handed around the organisation as an information booklet)
  • Tuesday and Wednesday, we’ve had the Prince’s Trust here performing a filming project, which I have been assisting in multiple ways such a
    • Researching various instruments such as Sutton Quadrants and Nocturnals to able to explain how they operated
    • Being interviewed on physics and astronomy, answering questions given by the public on what it would be like to visit various bodies

Round-up :

I’ve massively enjoyed working at the Royal Astronomical Society and would recommend working there or just visiting generally. A huge thanks to everyone there for hosting my placement.

Don’t forget: SPACE IS AWESOME

Richard Out!

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’. The skip arrived on the morning of my last day and thankfully next to nothing of what I had identified went in it. There was a sacred pile of objects to invest time and money into keeping and the remainder will be sold at auction. I let myself speculate about where they may end up…. In another museum, someone’s garden, redesigned into a piece of art or furniture. Hopefully they won’t end up unused in someone’s barn all over again!

The main aim was to keep things that could tell a story to our visitors.

GRANARY LADDER. The woodworms know to stay clear, as this ladder means business. It is chunky and heavy with well-worn indents from tired feet. It has lifted many pairs of legs and helped with hours of hard work lifting goods.

SPADE IRON. This thin iron plate with two worn leather straps may be covered in years of cob webs and dust, but to its previous owners it was a must have to complete the chic land worker look. The metal plate protects costly boot soles from wear after hours of stomping spades into the ground. How many ditches has it dug and how many drainage pipes has it buried?

Paul Genever and his daughter Kate, farmers from Croft Farm, educated me about the important topic of land drainage. A process I was previously completely unaware of. They came for a quick look at the collection and left several hours later. We tried to visualise how the objects were used and even ended up acting as horses harnessed up and pulling one of the hay sweeps. I think this was mostly for my benefit as they knew what 99/100 items were. They kindly posted me a land drainage map of one of their fields and it is so beautiful I’m considering framing it. Previously I had no idea that all that terracotta or plastic pipe was intricately woven under every field providing the perfect water concentration for the crops. It is like the furiously flapping feet of a duck bellow a tranquil mill pond surface.

I am going to miss working outdoors, the freedom to have lunch with the peacocks, hold the rabbits or lead the donkeys on a walk. The calming sounds of the mill wheel turning and the Swallows flying overhead.

A big thank you to the team at Sacrewell and the general manger, Debbie Queen. I was made to feel very welcome and valued on the project. Thank you Imperial for sponsoring my internship and in turn helping Sacrewell move closer to preserving their collection. I hope that I can come back in 3 years’ time to the permanently set up museum collection and experience it afresh. Hopefully I will be coming back as an agricultural engineer.

http://www.kategenever.com/

https://merl.reading.ac.uk/

WELCOME TO SACREWELL FARM

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?

At the end of the week I started a research task trying to find who had gifted an 18th century Arabic celestial globe to the RAS, which involved sifting through old records the society maintains.

I also attended a couple meetings with the acting executive director over a PhD careers event in Manchester and the working comms group of the UKSA which gave me some good insight about the external work it does with government organisations and companies. It covered events such as new scientist live and press work for the Cassini Grand Finale. (RIP Cassini ! )

On Saturday, I helped the RAS with their Open House event, as part of the Open House London Weekend. This involved showing people the library, which was used to display the archives, and answering the public’s questions on astronomy, which got quite technical, with questions like “Where is the centre of the universe”?

(Pretty picture on the right shows some cool things, the big picture showing Cassini’s map of the moon. On the left there is a “log” from the “tree” where the “apple” “fell on “Newton’s” head.)

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. I hope as the first Technology intern, I have been of some use, even if it means knowing how they might do things differently next time, but working in this field has opened up a lot of doors in the future for potential career paths, which I am very grateful for!

On one of the days, I was given the opportunity again to go with the video team to do some filming, but this time in the Tate Britain! This was such a fun experience as I love both art and filming so combining the 2 was really exciting! I also attended a training day for “Networking that Brings Results” which was really helpful as I HATE the idea of networking – but I realised networking wasn’t just the typical image of everyone in a room talking to find what skillsets everyone has, but can be as simple as talking to someone you bump into about their work, as I have been constantly doing at Macmillan without realising!

Finally, we move onto the brilliant intern fundraising event which was the “Intern-ational day of Charity (5th September) pub quiz”! This was an absolute success as it was just so much fun getting all the interns together to run the whole thing. Being in charge of questions, there was a lot pressure in hoping that the questions run smoothly but it seems everyone had a great time. We had a raffle too, in which I won a bag of coffee (even though I don’t drink coffee…)! We ended up raising £700 which was incredible, and I can only recommend to the next set of interns to do a pub quiz too!

Overall the experience has been absolutely amazing – there was not one bit of the internship I didn’t enjoy as the work was really interesting, the interns and everyone in my team were so kind and friendly and I gained so much insight into so many areas of work which will certainly contribute to my future career choices.

I could not recommend doing this internship enough if you get the chance!

Thank you Macmillan Cancer Support!

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. This means that for now, there isn’t anything else for me to do for the church, and thus concludes the summer internship. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time, learned CSS, HTML, basic javascript, and reinforced my understanding of web server setups. I’ve also managed to add a new video to my YouTube channel and flew my drone indoors for the first time ever.

 

I’m fairly sure that I am the first person to ever make an interactive drone video. I’ve spent a good while searching the internet for other examples, and can’t find anything at all. I’m hoping that other people will see my work, and that I may be able to pick up some jobs building similar web apps in the future. Thanks Imperial for funding me to do such an exciting and useful project.

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.

I hit the ground running on Monday, being given a project by one of my supervisors, the head of library and archives, Sian. The project consisted of producing a short guide on using the Astrophysical Data System, a database run by the Smithsonian holding information on Astrophysics, Astronomy, Physics and Geophysics papers. I firstly got familiar with the system, never having used it before, and took Monday and Tuesday to draft it.

However! I was also given a policy project looking into possible arrangements of the UK’s science & technology relationship with the EU post-Brexit, specifically over arrangements regarding Horizon2020. Now this is something that has been incredibly meaty and head-racking, taking up quite a bit of my time and something that will probably take up quite a bit of my time over the remaining 3 weeks. Albeit it being confusing and lengthy (just like the Brexit negotiations!), it has been quite interesting finding and ingesting the EU legal documents on the subject.

On Tuesday, apart from the previous two projects mentioned, I partook in a teacher tour, where a group of teachers were shown the variety of activities that the RAS provides in outreach, such as demonstrations on the composition of a comet(using dry ice!) and some of the archives/antiquities they possess, like Caroline Herschel’s observations diary (The first woman to ever be paid as a Scientist, if you have time, google her story).

My Thursday and Friday continued in the same vein in regards to my policy work, but I also attended meetings regarding some other projects RAS is working on, such as a PhD careers event and assisting the City of Westminster Library. I also got my first taste of cataloguing and archiving.

So far, the experience has been a great change of pace and it’s been amazing working in an organisation which is all about space!

My next week includes continuing my EU research, drafting letters to send to politicians and helping prepare for the Royal Astronomical Society Open House on Sat 16th September, which I will also be assisting in.

Signing off until next week,

Richard

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.
Through this experience I have realised that when it comes to cosmetics, a lot of the work done is mostly trial and error. For example, say you had a viscosity issue when it came to your products; you would conduct some research or call a chemical supplier to obtain a chemical that might solve the issue and would make a sample of your desired product with the acquired chemical at a recommended concentration; If this works you’ve solved your viscosity issue. If not, you would adjust the concentrations of the additional chemical or find another alternative. Such circumstances truly do try your patience, and at times you feel like forgetting about the product and moving on to the next one, but nothing can beat the satisfaction you feel when you persevere and fix the issue.

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. In line with my aspiration to go into Science Communication, it was great to try and understand the importance of target audience and the average reading age when writing.

With respect to the project I’ve been working on, I had been using the final report of the research in Patient Needs in Digital to craft a presentation to be used by the technology directorate to display the findings and what we may want to do with the results. As Macmillan don’t currently have a strong strategy in digital, it’s exciting to potentially help develop Macmillan’s future plan. Being of my generation also helps to prioritise the most important features which will be used by the public.

A career’s management 1 to 1 was also set up by Macmillan to help the interns develop their career aspirations. This was great as we covered everything from LinkedIn and my CV to how best to approach the real world of jobs! The best thing to have happened in these 3 weeks, though, was the day that the video department allowed me to come with them on a filming day! We went to the University of Arts London to film and the experience was great. I hadn’t had any practical experience up until then and they were all friendly enough to let me bombard them with questions I had about the industry.

With only 3 weeks left, it’s surprising how quickly the internship has gone by but it’s been so much fun so far. The interns have been great company too along the way but for the next blog, look out for how out fundraising pub quiz goes!