My Day
During the week of April 10th to 16th,
I was working at the Science Festival at the Museum of
Scotland. On April 12th, I was in the Science
Zone showing a lung model to children and their parents,
explaining how the lung works and measuring their lung
capacity.
The
high point of my day was one child who was actually interested
in the lung and how it works. I don’t mean this to sound
like I was looking down on the people who came by to look
at the stall, but unfortunately most kids weren’t interested
in how things work at all. They just saw the computer
screen and wanted to find out how big their lungs were.
The
parents were usually the same, especially the fathers
who at some point seemed to forget that it was a kids’
event and only wanted to show off that their lungs were
bigger than their sons’/daughters’. So the children, and
parents, who actually listened with interest, took apart
the plastic model and tried reassembling it, and especially
the one child who was full of questions about things really
made my day!
My work on lungs
This
fits into my PhD work in so far as I work on fibrosis
of the lung. It doesn’t have much to do with what I am
working on, but we were asked by our department to help
out at the festival, and there aren’t many lung-related
things you can do on a limited budget and with small children.
It is especially challenging when there are quite a lot
of children, and more complicated experiments would take
too much time.
Apart
from the link of the topic to my PhD, the Science Festival
did help me in my general efforts to get more experience
in science communication, especially in how to explain
things to children, and in how to present an experiment.
The next time, I would probably arrange things differently
and try to make the informative bit more interesting for
them, probably more visual.
A fantastic teacher
My
interests in high school were spread across quite a range.
I was a scout leader, was leading childrens’
play groups in church, was learning four languages, played
hockey, learned programming, was in a theatre and a chemistry
experimentation group after school, and played the guitar
and bass guitar.
Until
a three months exchange that took me to Canada, I was
quite undecided as to what to do at university. It was
only there that my choice narrowed down to medicine, linguistics
or, thanks to a fantastic teacher, something chemistry-related.
In the end, I went for biochemistry in Tübingen,
the only place in Germany where you could specialise in
pharmacology/toxicology from a scientific background instead
of a medical one.
And, yes, I am from Germany. But as you can tell, I have studied
in Canada and am now in Scotland. Science takes you places.
