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First week at Women’s Engineering Society

When I started reading about Imperial’s Charity Insights scheme, I knew it was something I would like to get involved in- a chance to experience the office life while doing something (hopefully!) of value. I reached out to WES in the hope of getting some insight into that age-old problem which plagues many of us here- the famous “where are all the girls” enigma. At the same time I wanted to contribute in some way to reducing the barriers faced by women in STEM fields.

WES was set up in 1919 to help the women who had flooded into engineering roles during the war, but faced strong social pressure to give up their jobs once it was over. In the century that has passed since those days, the charity has evolved into an organisation focused on supporting women at all stages of their engineering careers: from secondary school girls who feel discouraged from taking science subjects, to professionals struggling to progress in their company, and all those in between.

One thing I was really happy about in the run-up to starting my internship was the amount of freedom I was given to choose my project. As a maths student, I felt I could be most helpful in data analysis related work, which would give me a chance to apply my statistics knowledge- what there is of it- and improve my programming skills. I met up with the WES CEO a couple of times and we decided that I would analyse the charity’s partner companies to determine their current level of gender diversity, and from this work out the best strategies for businesses hoping to attract and retain more women engineers.

In the first week I have been doing a lot of research about how companies operate, and have even begun to understand some of the strange business jargon! I have been surprised to learn how positive an effect diversity can have on a company’s results, and how many are now committed to improving. All in all, the work has been really interesting. On the first day, I sat in on the monthly staff meeting, which was the first time I had seen how a team functions effectively in the workplace and how employees’ different skills are brought together. The staff have been really kind, friendly and fun, and have in fact given me a lot of life advice, particularly on one day when I mentioned I was feeling clueless about what I wanted to do in the future.

Overall, I’m glad I have been given this opportunity because I’ve learned so much in just a short time. I have a long break until I return to WES now, since we have to wait for companies to get together the data we have asked them for. After this week, I’m really looking forward to coming back in September, and not just because of the unlimited free coffee.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writing an assessment is harder than you think!

I am now 2 weeks into my time at Team Up! I am into the full swing of tube commutes and office work. But for the more interesting part of my experience: I have almost completed the first section of my project, in which I am creating a new set of mathematics assessment materials. I will soon be moving onto the second half of the project, which will be based on updating and amending the current lesson plans. For this period, I will have more free range and control over how things develop, mostly because my supervisor is away on holiday!

So far, I have been working alongside said supervisor and, for two days a week, another volunteer. Firstly, I researched the current GCSE specifications and determined the knowledge required for each grade (or ‘level’ as they are now referred to, just to make things that little bit more confusing). I then cross referenced this with GCSE exam paper questions to produce a bank of example questions. This was all very time-consuming and took up the most part of my first week.

One of the main problems we faced when producing Team Up’s assessment was that we only had a maximum of 1.5 hours to test the students. The actual GCSE examinations consist of 3 hour-long papers, meaning that we only had half the assessment time. Because of this we had to be selective with the topics we chose to assess in order to try to test as much of the syllabus as possible.

We also had to consider the grades that the students were hoping to achieve. The students that Team Up works with are generally pushing towards achieving a grade 5 at GCSE (a high C/low B). A foundation tier paper allows students to achieve a maximum grade 5. To avoid restricting the students’ achievements, Team Up had proposed an assessment allowing students to achieve up to a grade 6 (high B). To achieve this without having to introduce higher tier content we looked at the breakdown of the different assessment objectives (put simply, how many easy/hard questions there are on the paper) in both the higher and lower tier papers and chose an intermediate weighting to allow higher ability students to show off their skills.

So far, the main learning point for me is the amount of work that goes into setting assessments. There are so many different restrictions and objectives to meet, let alone coming up with suitable questions! Throughout all of this you need to be guessing what the students of different abilities will/will not understand. There is no set formula for a grade 6 on a paper, when an exam board sets this they already have all the marks for the paper and use these to inform their decision. Trying to do this backwards as we are is very difficult!

Week 1

Despite being a 1st year Biology student, the amount of knowledge I have regarding neuroscience and neuro-disability is basic to say the most, much like the majority of the younger generation since the wonders of the brain and its workings are not a majorly touched on in the school curriculum.

The Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability is an awe inspiring charity that provides specialist care for patients with neuro-disability and aims not only to rehabilitate patients but to improve their quality of life as a whole. For my project I will be working with the RHN with the aim of producing a toolbox of presentations that the hospital can use when visiting schools to raise awareness for the neuro-disability and the work of the charity, some of which will also be presented by myself.

My first day at the charity was smoother and more comfortable than expected. On my first day I was given a desk, introduced to colleagues and given a tour of the beautiful 18th century building. During the tour I was shown some of the therapy rooms and computer rooms which contained lots of new and exciting technology such as eye gaze machines (tracks pupil movement to communicate) and different controls on computers that can be adapted depending on the mobility of the patients.

The first week consisted heavily of research on the charity, neuro-disability and the brain which I need to include in the presentations. The research was fairly independent however my supervisor also has a wealth of knowledge on everything to do with the charity and neuroscience so of course she was of great help. She provided me with lots of resources to do with not only the charity but also neuroscience and is always teaching me new ways to make my presentation more engaging.  At the start of the week I also contacted and visited my old secondary school to tell them about my project and now I am booked in for the next academic year to deliver my presentation to year 7 and 8.

So far the 1st week flew by and I can’t wait for what’s to come

Second week at Marches Energy Agency

To be honest I didn’t even realise that my journey at MEA has just pasted the half point a few days ago, not sure if it’s because my concentration on work or just because of that theory which states you feels time goes faster as you grow older. Anyway, let me introduce you what I have done since my first post.

After armed myself with related knowledge and learned what the organization do, I began to do researches that would benefit both MEA and myself. Nowadays solar PV is becoming a popular option for consumers to cut their energy bill as the price of Solar panel dropped significantly since 2011(from £11000 to around £5000 for a 16kW panel). It’s also estimated that the national electricity price will increase in the following years, thus several organizations, including SolarTrade UK, one of the leading team in the field, believe that there will be a large expansion of Solar PV business by 2020. Apart from that, lot of families also got themselves a rechargeable battery to store day-time energy for the night use, saving them even more money on bills. MEA is looking forwards to knowing the recent development of solar technology, also the situation of related business, including how the other charities or councils are supporting the development. With those questions in mind I started my research journey.

I got the most of the answer from internet, especially in the UK government website where there’s a file folder that contains all the solar panel installation record across the country. I managed to separate multiple data points and produced some graphs for presentation. I also came up with a list of councils that are supporting their local solar PV construction, by investigating their website and their registration documents I got some idea of how their funding works and how much money is spent on the work. I actually learned how to do those in week 1, guess those reading have already paid off.

As I mentioned in my last post I got the chance to visit a solar manufacturer in Birmingham last Friday. I briefly interviewed one of the staff about the future of this application, the staff told me that the price of Solar PV might not drop further in short future as China is offering solar panel at such a low price that the actual sale price has to be increased to protect UK market.

Tomorrow I am going to give a presentation about my research, after that I will investigate the work of other energy charities and possibly find what MEA can learn from them in the future. I will be back shortly with further report, see you soon.

Final Week at The Brilliant Club

On the Monday of my fourth week at The Brilliant Club, the organisation held a Mid-term review. The entire team of approximately 60 people gathered in a single conference room and each department (Finance, Operations, Evaluation etc.) held a brief presentation to communicate their work and its outcomes to other departments. This was a unique experience in that it helped me complete my picture of how the entire organisation functioned and how different departments complement each other.

I had two major tasks to complete throughout this last week: to conduct interviews with former tutors from The Scholar’s Programme which I had scheduled in the previous week and to write up the report for the 2016 London Provider Feedback Survey according to the organisation’s brand and style guidelines.

Conducting interviews was a completely new experience – for the first time, I found myself on the other side of the barrier. I was surprised to find out just how much time an interviewer must put into the preparation of the interview so that he or she is not caught off track by the interviewee. Before my very first interview, I practised talking through the introductory information that I would communicate to the interviewee before proceeding with the interview itself; I also practised the interview questions themselves. Even then, in the middle of the first interview, when there was pressure on me to ask questions smoothly one after the other to give the impression that I have the interview under control, at one moment I panicked and briefly lost track of my thoughts. However, after this first time, the flow of all subsequent interviews was perfect. The former tutors expressed a variety of opinions on issues such as whether their experience at TBC had any impact on them applying for their current position or whether their experience at TBC is in anyway useful on their current position. My initial plan was to tape-record all interviews and transcribe the responses but this would have been far too time-consuming and, given the circumstances, unrealistic. I therefore took notes throughout each interview and then transcribed them into a table. Unfortunately, given that I started this project during in my 3rd week, I would not have time to process the answers in any way. However, I did submit all the recorded responses to TBC for them to process.

In between my interviews, I worked on the report. I read the organisation’s brand guidelines handbook to understand how branded documents are put together. I also read through the organisation’s style guidelines to understand how to write about sensitive issues. For example, the organisation prefers the term ‘under-represented groups’ rather than ‘disadvantages groups’, ‘high-performing’ rather than ‘smart’ or ‘bright’ (as the latter two are not quantifiable), and ‘highly-selective universities’ rather than ‘elite’ or ‘prestigious’. In the previous week, I produced various figures to visualise the survey data, this week I wrote down findings and recommendations. For example, it turned out that some project providers would like to have access to more guidance material as to how to best supervise the student throughout the placement and also see some more personal development training for the students prior to the start of their placement. On the last day of my placement, I submitted the work to my supervisor, shook hands with everyone to say goodbye, received The Brilliant Club mug as a gift and that was it!

Third Week at The Brilliant Club: A New Project

At the start of my third week at The Brilliant Club (TBC), I learnt that I would not be able to interview project providers on The Nuffield Programme. The reason for this was most that although the Nuffield Research Placement scheme is run by TBC, it is funded by the Nuffield Foundation who did not approve of the project. This came as a slight shock because it meant that a significant part of the work I had done over the course of the past two weeks could not be used. However, there was fortunately a second option – I could quickly set up a different interview project where I would be to apply all of my recently acquired knowledge about the science of a research interview.

My new research project would be based on The Scholars Programme (TSP). TSP recruits, trains and employs PhD tutors to deliver university-style tutorials to small groups of pupils at elementary and secondary schools. The subjects of the research would be former tutors from TSP. The research, in the broadest terms, would investigate the impact of the tutors’ experience at TBC on their future career. It would seek to find out which, if any, parts of their tutoring experience were beneficial to their future job application, and whether, if at all, had the time at TBC helped them to accelerate their career growth. The research, other than that it would provide destination data about TBC’s ex-employees, would serve as a baseline for the improvement of propagation material for the recruitment and retention of tutors.

This new research project was delegated to me by TBC’s Midlands & Southwest regional director who also sent me a list of about 30 e-mail addresses of TBC’s former tutors who stated in an exit survey that they are happy to remain in touch with TBC. Just as I had done for my first project, I drafted a research description, a series of questions to be asked, and an informative e-mail for my potential interviewees. Given that TSP is TBC’s internal programme, there was no need to wait for any confirmation and once the above-mentioned documents were approved by my supervisor, I began contacting tutors almost immediately. Out of the 30, 8 responded and said they would be willing to take part in the interview. I received these responses throughout the week and therefore scheduled all interviews for the following, fourth, week.

During my third week at TBC, I also began working more intensively on the ‘2016 London Provider Feedback Survey’. As mentioned in my previous post, this survey was completed by previous year’s project providers on the Nuffield Research Placement scheme and my task was to summarize the data from the survey and come up with recommendations. The survey was completed by approximately 50 respondents from the Greater London & Surrey area and asked 4 principal types of questions: i) Yes-No-Maybe, ii) Select from the following, iii) Strongly Agree – Agree – Neither – Disagree – Strongly Disagree, and iv) Open-Ended Answer.  I tallied all responses and transferred all data to relevant figures: pie charts, bar graphs, doughnut charts etc. I completed all the necessary data processing during this week and planned the report writing for the next.

Throughout all this time, my responsibility still was to scout for new contacts at London’s universities/research institutes and send out e-mails. The response rate was still very low but every new project provider recruited meant that one or more students could now have a life-changing experience, which is what kept me motivated to carry on working on this otherwise rather dull task.

 

My first week at Clarity

My first week at Clarity passed by quicker than expected. But that could be the result of starting on a Tuesday and finishing early on the Friday. But before I dive into the events of my first week at the charity, let me provide you with an insight into what they’re all about.

Clarity is a social enterprise that produces home care and personal care products. The company has charitable status as the majority of their workforce has some form of disability. The charity uses the money that they make from the sale of their products to support and provide employment for those with disabilities.

The role I have taken on within the charity involves working as a lab assistant and conducting desk-based research. Currently my research is focused on finding an alternative to an antibacterial agent that is used in some of their hand washes. Although this compound has not been banned by the E.U, its use in personal care products has been restricted to 0.3%, for it has found to cause hormonal imbalances and has been linked to cancer.

Although there are various types of antibacterial agents, finding an alternative has slightly more difficult than expected. This is due the sensitivity of the formulations currently used to make the hand wash, any slight changes could completely alter the stability of the product. Therefore, over the next two weeks, I’ll be focusing on how the formulations can be adapted to the use of different antibacterial agents.

First Two Weeks at The Brilliant Club: The First Project

My Charity Insights internship is at The Brilliant Club – a charity that aims to increase the number of students from under-represented backgrounds at highly-selective universities in the United Kingdom. The Brilliant Club office is located in the Kensington Centre on Hammersmith road, next to Kensington Olympia. The entire London branch of the organisation is housed in a large open-space office which is shared together with Future First and has a seating capacity of approximately 100 people. My motivation to undertake a placement at this organisation stemmed from my previous experience of working for People In Need – a Czech charity focused on educating children from excluded Roma communities in the Czech Republic, and from my long-held belief that is it through education that growing world inequality should be tackled.

My four-week internship at the Brilliant Club was, in broad terms, to consist of helping the organisation run the so-called Nuffield Research Placements scheme and simultaneously complete a related research project. The Nuffield Research Placement scheme is a four to six-week summer programme, where 16-17-year-old students are placed across research institutions in London. Under the supervision of a researcher (called the ‘project provider’), they complete an individual research project in the provider’s area of science. It is an opportunity for them to gain first-hand experience of what working in a research environment is really like just before applying to university. The scheme is funded by the Nuffield Foundation (hence called the ‘Nuffield Research Placements’) but it is contracted to and run by The Brilliant Club in Greater London & Surrey. On this scheme, The Brilliant Club mainly supports students from low income backgrounds or with no family history of higher education as a part of their mission to widen university access.

My individual project at The Brilliant Club would also revolve around the Nuffield Research Placements scheme. The initial idea was that the goal of the project would be to find out how the proposition to supervise a secondary-school student can be made more attractive to the researcher. Unlike other programmes run by the organisation, where tutors are paid, there is no financial support offered to project providers on this programme. As a result, a majority of researchers (over 90%) contacted to host a student decline the opportunity, and each year, there are students enrolled in the programme for whom a placement cannot be provided. My role would be to interview current project providers, attempt to identify key motivational factors and subsequently draw conclusions about how new researchers could be attracted to take part in the scheme.

My time at The Brilliant Club, that has now come to a conclusion, can be broken down into three distinct phases and I have dedicated a blog post to each of these. The first phase, in which I will talk in more detail in this blog post, essentially stretched over the period of the first two weeks. The subsequent two were a week long each.

My first day at the organisation started off with induction formalities. I received a laptop, a company e-mail address, access to the company’s shared file database, a card to access the office, and was also shown how to evacuate the building in case of an emergency.  Throughout the day, I was introduced by various members of staff in one-on-one presentations to all the programmes run by the organisation (The Scholar’s Programme, Researchers In Schools etc.). Mainly, however, I was briefed by my supervisor where things currently stand with regards to the Nuffield Research Placement scheme and what work she would like me to complete. I was told that a certain number of students have been accepted to participate in the scheme based on their academic credentials (I cannot disclose exact numbers due to the issues of confidentiality) but that The Brilliant Club has not yet managed to secure placements for all of them, i.e. that there simply are not enough project providers. Over the following two weeks, my task would be to compile contact information of researchers in universities, research institutes, small business etc. who could potentially host a student. I would then send each and every one of them a so-called ‘cold-contact’ e-mail with main information about the programme and ask them whether they would be interested in hosting a student. This was a rather dull and repetitive task but something that had to be done and there was no other way around it. My other task, was to read through and summarise a survey titled the ‘2016 London Provider Feedback Survey’. This survey was completed by previous year’s project providers and detailed their experiences of hosting a Nuffield student. The work on this would become more intense in the 3rd and 4th weeks of my time at The Brilliant Club and will be described in more detail in future blog posts.

Throughout the first two weeks, I also worked on my project. Coming from an engineering background, I had no prior knowledge of how to conduct a research interview – a social science discipline. I consulted a paper from ‘The National Centre for Research Methods’ titled ‘How many qualitative interviews is enough?’ to give me an idea of the scope of the task I had set myself. After having read through some more material about how to conduct research interviews, I began drafting a number of documents: i) a description of my research to clearly articulate its purpose and lay out what information is to be gathered from the interviewees, ii) a rough sequence of questions to be asked, iii) a draft message to be sent to the project provider to explain what the research is and why their input is essential. After two weeks of preparation, all I was waiting for, and hoped this would be a formality, was an approval from the Nuffield Foundation that I can start conducting the interviews.

 

 

Marylebone FoodCycle: the journey continues

As most – if not all – precious participants of Charity Insights reflected in their blog posts, I  too cannot believe three weeks have already flown by. I have learned and shared so much on my ongoing journey in the volunteering and non-for-profit sector. Since this post is meant for the reader, whatever brings you to read these words, to get a glimpse of my placement, I thought I’d share the most important and decisive moments I have had so far.

The key week was the second week, which involved lots of networking events where I had the opportunity the exchange thoughts with people from various backgrounds, ranging from hotel managers to social workers. On Tuesday, my colleagues and I attended the local Networking Lunch at the London Business School. This event takes place every other month and allows charities and businesses in the neighbourhood to meet and discuss potential challenges, partnerships or simply browse new ideas. I talked to several local charities with a similar target audience to that of my Wellbeing Project (the development of a new Women Cookery Club at St. Paul’s Church) and got very positive feedback and support.

The following day, Wednesday, was particularly challenging for me, since I had been asked to attend a formal meeting of hotel managers on Baker Street on behalf of Marylebone FoodCycle to discuss ways by which hotels could reduce food waste and support our organisation. It goes without saying that I felt very out of place as soon as I got to the Baker Street Quarter Partnerships headquarters, being only 21 years old. However, I was also thrilled to have such a professional experience and I am grateful for my supervisor Alex to have put her trust in me. The meeting went very well and it was insightful to meet people from the business world and to try to bridge two very different visions.

Both Wednesday afternoons were spent cooking for the Marylebone FoodCycle dinner, where I have met wonderful and passionate people from all over London and beyond, uniting for a great cause, our community meal. The first Wednesday was unexpectedly hectic since not only were we cooking for about 50 people for our own dinner, but we were also providing 100 extra portions for a mosque supporting victims of the Grenfell Tower. A Christian organisation cooking at the West London Synagogue for a mosque, what a better message of love and tolerance could we ask for?

Food Waste Heroes: here’s Svetla (one of the hub leaders) and me collecting food for the meal preparation !

On Friday, I attended a symposium on dairy and health as part of my focus on nutrition for the project. Here again, it was a great way of meeting people from different backgrounds and sharing thoughts. Since then, I have been browsing the web for further nutritional information and project planning, exchanging emails with local charities to meet their community and get advice towards my project.

I will write more about that last bit in my final report, so stick around for that the last blog post !

Summary of placement at the K&C Foundation

Reflecting back upon the first meeting with the Office Coordinator at the K&C Foundation, the primary objective was to raise awareness amongst small businesses in the borough. I am proud to say that I have visited and raised awareness amongst a total of 120 businesses during my time at the K&C Foundation. A total of 70 businesses provided appropriate contact details and were added to the business follow-up sheet, but not all of them were added to the database. During that same time, approximately twenty follow-up phone calls were made. I noticed that the businesses I contacted responded positively and were willing to discuss different ways in which they could get involved.

In search of small businesses that are keen to help the community, I visited several areas within the borough including Kings Road, Sloane Street, Fulham Road, and Knightsbridge. On my daily visits to these areas, I discovered that certain businesses were unlikely to respond positively to our cause as they had head offices based outside of the borough. As a result, I learnt to approach businesses selectively so that time would not be spent unnecessarily.

What I have gained:

Through my coordination with the team on different issues, I have learnt the importance of communication and clarity when approaching the task at hand. This skill will be useful during my third year when I work on the DMT (Design, Make and Test) project. Engaging with businesses directly has dramatically improved my confidence in presenting. Furthermore, I have gained knowledge about the extreme contrasts in wealth and opportunity that exist within the borough.

What the Foundation has gained:

Over the period of four weeks, a total of 120 small businesses are aware of the work carried out by the K&C Foundation. This opens the door for leads to be pursued through the contact details brought back and entered into the database.

My recommendations for the Foundation:

  • Target keen university students during the summer by approaching the careers’ service at Imperial College London.
  • Allow someone from the team (a volunteer perhaps) at K&C to visit small businesses in Golborne Road and Portobello Road and discuss possible ways to get involved. Several of them didn’t have email and therefore were not added into either the database or the business follow-up sheet.
  • Work with the same printing shop during the year in order to build a relationship and negotiate prices.

I am really grateful for this opportunity to have worked with an “umbrella” charity over the last month, leaving me with many positive experiences.