Blog posts

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Am I in Google?

The green chairs are my favourite

My first impression when waking into Nesta’s main office was: “Am I in Google?” From the colourful shapes and designs spread across the walls to the couches by the window overlooking the OXO Tower, it felt like I had stepped into the hippest Silicon Valley start up by a recent Stanford graduate in the world. And this feeling was only reaffirmed throughout the week.

Nesta’s work, put simply, is innovation. They aim to take ground breaking ideas and make them a reality, covering pretty much all topics imaginable, like healthcare, democracy and policy-making. My personal focus for the next 4 weeks will be a mixture of investigating personal data economy and digital democracy, which is the coolest project I’ve ever done.

Of course, I started by just reading through a mountain of documents trying to wrap my head around some of the complex data science concepts that were going to be my bread and butter for the next month (disclaimer: I still don’t fully understand them). I was even able to attend interviews so I could hear from the experts themselves, which was incredibly revealing. Never have I learnt so much about a topic in so little time (if you don’t count exams week).

Peppered throughout my week were coffee breaks with various employees. Although some did invite me to a hot chocolate and therefore I might be biased, I can say they were some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. They took time from their busy schedules to tell me about their research topics and I can honestly say after hearing them talk, I would like to do an internship with every single one of them.

I hope- no, I know, that in the weeks to come I will get to meet some more amazing people and learn even more about the world of politics and data science, and of course some more hot chocolate would be nice.

 

Highlight of the week: Watching a Wimbledon match whilst having strawberries and cream during our lunch break on the 6th floor terrace overlooking the River Thames.

Is this sentence structure simple?

Sentence structure is central to human language. We understand the difference between the sentences: “Sam is happy because he won the Lottery.” and “Won the Lottery, Sam is happy.” The former follows the rules of the English language; the latter is more likely to be spoken by Yoda in Star Wars.

We are able to understand such simple sentences as well as more complicated ones. However, how do we ensure that a computer (or SkyNet) is able to do so?

Well, this is the job of Natural Language Processing, or NLP for short. My job at Full Fact involves improving their automated factchecking process, and this entails using NLP to process whatever claims that politicians, journalists etc. might make.

If you haven’t read my previous post, our factchecking process can be narrowed down to 3 stages: the first involves using NLP to process the claim while the second involves going to the relevant websites, such as the Office for National Statistics, to get the relevant data. At the last stage, we would present the simplified data in a way that is easy for all of mankind to understand.

This week, much of our focus was on the bridge between the first and the second stage. While it might seem feasible on paper, NLP presently has yet to reach the capabilities of Jarvis, Tony Stark’s ultracapable artificial intelligence in Iron Man. We focused on obtaining the keywords from sentences such as ‘GDP rose in 2015’ and then linking these keywords to claims of a certain type. The latter gives us an idea of what data to obtain from the ONS website and then present.

We are still working on this ‘bridge’. While our NLP programme understands a simple sentence like ‘GDP rose in 2015’, it encounters trouble for more complicated sentences like ‘GDP has been rising consistently from 2010 to 2015’. Hopefully this ‘bridge’ in the future would as strong and stable as London Bridge.

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.

My First Days at the K&C Foundation

Before starting my 4 weeks at the K&C Foundation I had sorted a plan of action with the Foundation about how I could work with them and contribute to their existing schemes. However, this was all prior to the horrific Grenfell Tower Fire. The K&C Foundation has been instrumental in collecting funds raised to help the victims and those affected by the fire and making sure that 100% of the money donated reaches those in need. Usually in the little K&C office, there are 5 people who work and who take in under 50 cheques a month. Due to the fire this drastically changed. With thousands of donations flooding in through 5 different mediums including online and physically, they were swamped with the generosity of people globally. They had up to this point dealt with everything extremely well but obviously the staff’s usual roles were halted whilst they focused on organising the distribution of donations for the Grenfell Tower Appeal.

My first week happened to be roughly 4 weeks after the disaster. Life was just starting to get back to normal in the office, with the everyone starting to look back at their emails pre Grenfell, reorganising cancelled meetings etc etc. This however did not mean that there wasn’t any Grenfell admin left to be done, and this is where I stepped in. My first week mainly revolved around inputting the 1000’s of donated checks into the Foundation’s database, uploading CAF vouchers (which is another way for individuals to donate money), and learning how the K&C Foundation processes and keeps track of their money. What I worked on next was tackling the enormous spreadsheet of cheque donations. I divided this spreadsheet into various categories of School, Churches, Businesses, Organisations and Individuals and was able to identify the most generous of donations. I then began finding addresses and emails for donors in order to write letters of thanks from the K&C Foundation. This charity prides themselves on being personal and small enough to be able to really connect with their donors and therefore it was definitely a high priority to thank the generosity of the population. I got to have exciting trips to put in cash donations from charity buckets and go and visit ‘FRANK’ which is the franking machine using to put postage on letters.

This task took up a significant amount of time of week 1 understandably due to the thousands of people who had donated to the cause. After the cheque donations, I was taught how to update contacts in the Foundation’s database, which is a instrumental tool that they use in order to keep in contact with those that donate funds.

Having dealt with this primarily for cheque donations, I moved onto the other mediums of donation. The K&C Foundation was accepting donations not only through cheques, but also their own website, Just Giving, The Big Give and Bank transfers. I was tasked with analysing this data to find the groups of people who had donated significant amounts of money and compiling a list, so that in future weeks the Foundation can organise a function to thank these people again.

My first couple of days at the K&C Foundation have really shown to me the generosity of people. Processing multiple cheques from the same individuals shows how some humans just want to keep on giving again and again. Also being able to understand that some people have the humility to donate over £10,000 anonymously, and that they don’t donate to boost their egos and make themselves feel better, they just want to improve the lives of others, this I find amazing. I have also learnt how to work in a small office environment, and how in a small team, nothing you do is for yourself, everyone fills in to help each other where needed and no one has any qualms about being asked questions and taking on extra roles. I am very much looking forward to the rest of my time here- seeing how the Foundation normally functions on a regular basis, and how each of the roles in the office support charities and schemes in the borough.

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.